BECKLEY — Kudlow had a great discussion on unemployment with CATO’s very own Alan Reynolds. I tried to find this on YouTube but it’s not out so I can’t embed it here so click the link above. Suffice to say that when you subsidize something (like unemployment) you always get more of it. There are great lessons here for Jobs bills, Stimulus spending, Health Care, and even taxes.
Advertisement
TennesseePaul
Stephen VanNuys
Brooklyn Daniel
The Freedom Thinker
Excellent video. I am a big Kudlow fan and try to watch him daily. I heard a great line on his show a couple of days ago. I am paraphrasing, but it went something like this:
“The bailouts effectively nationalized risk and privatized profit. This is not Capitalism…”
Succinctly put I think. This statement also applies itself well to the unemployment issue. If the government is going to minimize the risks of being unemployed…why not just take the profit and take it easy?
Good stuff.
Chuck
Nope not Capitalism; National Socialism is what we are shooting for I think. This is why they are taking the risks but not the profit. If they take the profit that is Communism.
Yeah – great video. Didn’t realize the FOMC had attributed up to 1% of the unemployment rate to the stimulus plan. Very interesting.
The problem with conservatism in a lot of ways is that it just doesn’t sound good. Kudlow and Reynolds sound insensitive- but they are absolutely correct.
Democrats do well b/c they hand out freebies. It just sounds better to anyone listening.
Conservatives make sense and identify counter-intuitive problems that explain certain economic phenomena while simultaneously proposing thoughtful, counter-intuitive solutions that have long-term sustainability.
Democrats hand out freebies. Buy now – pay later. When you pay, just inflate the currency and pay in debased dollars. And hand out a few more freebies.
Which side would you rather be on when making an argument in a democracy?
The irony is that by extending unemployment benefits from 26 to 99 weeks in about half the states, Congressional Democrats have greatly increased the odds that they will be booted out of office in November — because voters tend to blame the Party in power for bad news. Insensitive or not, the economics of the issue are not in doubt. We’re not sure whether it raised unemployment by 1 percentage point or 1.7 percentage points, but it’s somewhere in that range. If you were a legislator trying to hold onto your job, would you rather the unemployment rate be 9.7% or 8%?
Very true, Alan. I concur. I think the public is still going to be very angry about unemployment come November, and it is ironic that bleeding hearts have extended and subsidized continued high unemployment. Of course, these politicians are so far removed from the consequences of their own decisions, they probably don’t realize what they have done.