No Job? Too Bad!

Twenty-five years and change ago, on his way to becoming the second Democratic presidential candidate to lose 49 states, Walter Mondale complained that the Republican attitude to unemployment was that if you were jobless, you were on your own. The unemployment rate was falling at the time of the 1984 presidential campaign - even though most of the jobs that were created paid less than $11,000 a year, a laughable annual salary even then - and so Mondale's gripe fell on deaf ears. That same complaint doesn't seem to be getting anyone anywhere these days either. Republicans have continuously blocked extending unemployment benefits in the Senate, and neither party has been in any rush to help people who have been out of work for 99 weeks - that's nearly two years, folks - out of fear of deficit spending. Ed Schultz, on his MSNBC show, has complained that the Senate isn't listening to the people.

Uh, they kind of are. It turns out that Ed Schultz's Minnesota populism is as popular as Mondale's was back in the eighties. Cathy Lewis, a public talk radio host from metropolitan southeastern Virginia (where Schultz is originally from, incidentally), says that the topic of unemployment benefits doesn't come up a lot on her radio show. "I think," Lewis told Gwen Ifill on the PBS NewsHour last night about the benefits issue, "you only find that level of discontent if you yourself are affected by it. That's my sense on the radio program that I do every day. I don't hear people talking as much about that. What I hear them talking about is the hiring and the jobs are not coming back as quickly as they had hoped that they would."

In other words, if the people aren't so concerned about it, the Senate won't act on it. And why should most Americans be concerned? There are currently four million Americans who are affected by unemployment benefits running out, but in a nation of three hundred million or so, that's not a number that's going to move any Republicans in the Senate. Nor does it move many other Americans. I think Cathy Lewis's remarks about her listeners in Virginia indicate a general attitude among Americans toward the unemployment benefits issue; if it's not their problem, why care about it?

Bear in mind also that, even in the worst of economic circumstances, unemployed Americans, including the discouraged jobless people or part-timers not officially counted in the unemployment rate, are always a minority of the population. The employed majority are usually more interested in keeping their own jobs in a recession than helping others find a job or hold on to a safety net. Indeed, Lewis noted that many people in her area are more interested in preserving the jobs they have than creating new ones with the federal stimulus money southeastern Virginia has received. And you can bet there are a lot of voters - especially independents - who worry about too much spending.

Democrats in Washington are trying to balance the budget on demand, trying to find cuts to offset emergency spending on jobless benefits so as to avoid deficit spending. Spending more money to put more people to work - building infrastructure, for example - seems to be out of the question. And the Democrats' efforts to accommodate deficit hawks may not be enough. Bottom line? What Walter Mondale said in 1984 is true today.