Unemployment Benefits Expire

While I am sure there is plenty of anecdotal evidence supporting the view that extended benefits only extend laziness, I would like to counter with my own anecdotal evidence.

I just recently found work again after being out of work for over a year. I spent my savings before even applying for unemployment because in the past I never had any problems finding new work. In fact, up until a year and a half ago there always seemed to be a chance for better work and more money.

This time, however, the market was a desert. Once my savings were spent and I was on unemployment, I was applying for ANYTHING I could get. While applications were rolling out the door every day the opportunity to interview was rare. When interviews did take place they were often in excess of two hours away and for positions that were beneath what I had done before. These always ended with the employer saying I lived too far away or telling me I was overqualified. When I would then beg for the job they always said the same thing. If I took their offer for half my previous salary, it was too great a risk because once a better job came up they felt I would cut and run. After a year I would tell them that with that logic they would have had a.more.experienced worker for half the price for that whole year.

It didn't make a difference.

After banging on that wall over and over for over a year I finally got work again. I make half as much as at my last job and do administrative work in the type of department I used to manage.

This market is hitting older, more experienced, more expensive talent. Out of the hundreds of retail and blue collar applications I sent, I never got so much as a call back. Not one. Who hires educated, older, corporate experienced people to drive a truck or run a register? Nobody.

I don't doubt for a second that there are others gaming the system. But I meet more people and hear more stories about hard-working successful people being locked out of jobs due to their past success every day.

Abandoning unemployment benefits now leaves a massive talent pool with nothing but foreclosure, bankruptcy and public poverty. Good jobs run credit checks. Good jobs frown on foreclosures and bankruptcies.

When you take the future away from smart, motivated, talented people, you not only cripple the nation's pool of talent...you set them loose to ensure their own survival at all costs.

And the number of desperate people grows every day. An army of millions of desperate people. People on your street. People watching you leave your house for work every day. People who need what you have.

It's not about what your political views are anymore. It's about the laws of survival. That is what happens when we abandon the humanity of our people, our nation and our brothers.

I am ashamed.

reply to post by Darkrunner


Yes plenty of people milk the system, but there is a whole new animal being born now. What was once the hard working middle class is systematically being destroyed.

You - yourself will not realize this until you find your job outsourced or insourced.

It's called lack of empathy and affects most people until the brown stuff hits their fan.

I donate two days a month to a soup kitchen, do you?

The people we use to get in line were drug addicts, mentally challenged, lazy and veterans that got screwed out of their full due.............now we are seeing people that were once "middle class", home owners, with kids, a car, a dog the whole American Dream that had one medical issue, one other issue like job loss(es) and all their hard work and striving was shot down.

And, it's not one or two thousand, read The Trillion Dollar Conspiracy, it's tens of millions now.

Again, next read, "Hostile Takeover" by David Sirota.

The enemy isn't so much over there as over here sitting in Washington DC.

reply to post by NightShift


You are right, and whats more, your post I have now heard a couple hundred times in my city alone.

Whatsmore, if you are over 50 - jobs are really scarce, the companies like to hire and do discriminate against older workers (try and prove it though).

Between the outsourcing and insourcing jobs for the natural born American have almost dried up and it's only going to get worse.

I too use to think, only the lazy remain unemployed and take goverment handouts.............years back that statement was more true, but now, in 2010 it's a fallacy, times have changed.

reply to post by freedish


My company moved over 2,000 jobs over to India. My guess is another 5,000 jobs are being planned to be outsourced asap with my previous employer.

My friend's company moved 1,432 jobs over to Mexico.

There are two books I have read called, "Outsourcing America" by Ron Hira & Anil Hira and "Hostile Takeover" by David Sirota that might possibly give you a better understanding of the knee deep $hit Americans are going to find themselves in, in trying to remain employed in the coming decade.

We haven't seen anything yet, the unemployment is going to begin to affect all of us.

Several people I talked to (in the food hand out line) were working but had their job either insourced or outsourced.

American companies are no longer creating jobs for Americans. Many are handing American jobs over to citizens of foreign countries with the blessing of our government.

So much for our government looking out for us. But of course, the common American Citizen is not able to contribute (bribe) the millions of dollars to our politicians or promise our politicians high paying career moves once their government stint is completed like the corporations commonly do.

We will, however, be expected to foot the bill for the major financial companies going belly up.

Many American companies are hiring non American Workers by insourcing or outsourcing and leaving Americans jobless or having to settle for lower wages to compete with foreign workers.

American companies are shooting for greedy profits at the expense of the American Worker.

Money does not trickle down, that is a fallacy..............simply do the research.

The top percentage of wealth is being hoarded and not on American soil.

The tens of billions of Indians and Chinese are now claiming some of that pie, and the top 1% of the world's rich aren't about ready to share.

The pie has already been cut, 3/4 for the top 1% of the wealthest people on the planet and the remaining 1/4 for the rest of us, you included, unless your last name is Rockefeller or one of the other twelve elite families.

If you don't believe me simply start researching "insourcing and outsourcing".

Greed and power are the ruling forces of our corporate owned governments pure and simple and they don't care who they run over or destroy to achieve both.

While our government is busy putting more restrictions on us and scrutinizing our every move they are looking the other way when it comes to bankster fraud and companies giving away American jobs.

It is our government and the corporations they are in bed with that need to be supervised and regulated more closely and not the American People.

This will continue until enough Americans and the rest of the planet (because America is just ground zero for the NWO), stand up and some how resist this insane way of running our planet.

Again I will use the analogy of a royal family sitting at the feasting table (the 1% globally elite) and a pack of hungry dogs on the floor (the rest of the world, most of you readers included).

The king and his court will throw a scrap here and there for amusement and to assure themselves of their power watch the dogs fight each other for the meager scraps.

Where as, if the dogs were smart, they would stop fighting each other for the tiny bits of food, attack and kill the king and his feasting court, then divide the food more evenly among themselves.

But the dogs are just stupid and will keep fighting among themselves not seeing things could be different if they united and took action against their greedy oppressors.

Slightly off topic, but not really...

Check this thread out
Some crappy ghost thread

Now, this thread here has been on ATS for a couple hours now..and is -not- in the hot active topics...has not been.

Yet the ghost thread with a couple dozen comments and zero flags is considered more active.

This is not the first time this has happened, and I did ask a mod why it seemed any thread at least I create will never see the hot topics, the flag things, etc...was told basically there is no conspiracy, other topics are hotter.

this is clearly a lie...ATS seems to have an agenda, and some news seems to be actively suppressed, I now am fully convinced that anything considered slightly too "liberal" for their website, that is not some odd rant that ends up making the left look silly, will indeed be supressed.

I used to think that ATS was neutral, that hot topics were simply pushed forward by algorithms, and you simply cannot interfere with that...now I see that is a falsehood. ATS is clearly a propaganda network for right wing conspiracy theories and political agendas

You will also notice right around election season, tons of "seasoned" right wing vets come out of the woodwork and get front page splashes of their verbetam talking points on whatever Limbaugh or Beck discussed a couple hours earlier...and of course a couple "colms" liberals giving the most weak and strawman arguements as a retort.

I am pretty certain in this...how does this relate to the topic?

The right wing is currently, by every measure according to the bipartisan congressional commission, doing the exact opposite to stimulate the economy. a proveable path to economic distress. To purposefully push forward an agenda that both right and left economic advisors say is destructive to the nation means you are in essence, attacking the nation

Is ATS supporting a terrorist organization?

(ya, this post will be nerfed...point being...mods...get this damn thing on active topics already...knock out some of those lame ones with no convo or flags)

The USA has been sold out. These corporatists are traitors to our country. The US is being stripped and "chopped" for parts. Now we are going to give even more tax breaks to the wealthy as they strip our country bare of every last bit of wealth. F**king Yuppies all think they are Rockefellers until they are downsized or outsourced.

First of all, I don't know the answer. I don't think unemployment benefits can go on forever, at some point the milk runs out. I prepared taxes for over 10 years and I've seen a large number of folks who do milk the system, whether it's Earned Income Tax Credit or unemployment. For those who like numbers, the last year I worked in California I prepared 360 tax returns. Out of that number approximately half (180) received some sort of tax handout such as EITC where the person withheld $0 and walked out with a tax check for several thousand dollars. Of that approx 180, I talked to *5* that I felt were in genuine need, such as a single mom (cheating husband) who was raising her kids, going to school to better her chances and working where she could. The rest, well, lots of manicures & fancy phones & "$5,000? Is that ALL I'm getting?!?". For unemployment, it was about half that were actively looking for work and half that told me, "eh, no hurry"... I think the percentages have probably changed since 2008, with more actively looking.

But what people need to realize is that it's not Democrats vs. Republicans! Neither party gives a rat's butt about you. They're all feeding at the corporate trough. Like Sen. Bennet was recorded as saying "It's all rigged". They are just two heads of the Hydra playing 3 card Monte with a half asleep public. It's ruling class against middle class. The gov't is busy helping create monopolies for their corporate masters - for example S510 (Food Safety Modernization Act) will choke off small seed cleaning operations handing the monopoly on seeds to Monsanto all gift wrapped.

So we get all hot and bothered by the "Bush Tax Cuts" that are "for the rich". Sorry to tell you all, but by positioning the argument against the rich they are playing you. If the tax cuts expire, it's going to hurt the middle class as well. ALL marginal tax rates will go up, including for the lower paid folks. ALL capital gains tax rates will increase and since more middle class families invest in stocks and mutual funds, that hurts them as well. The Child Tax Credit, which is currently $1,000 per child, will go back to $500. That means a middle class family with 3 kids just got an increased tax bill of $1,500 for 2011. And, my favorite, the "marriage penalty" gets reinstated, so I'm going to have less in a standard deduction and narrower tax brackets since I'm married than I would if I were single -- higher taxes? And when we all finish our tribute to Caesar next year it's gonna be our fault for framing it as R vs D and screaming at our handlers to punish the rich by eliminating the tax cuts rather than actually LOOKING at what the morons are doing. Arrgh, rant off.

Originally posted by Grumble
Merry Christmas, America, from your friends at the GOP.

Seriously, the deeper issue here is that high productivity has rendered most of the working class unnecessary. We as a nation face a decision: will we accept that socialism, sharing, or whatever you want to call it is needed to help the millions who built the structures through which the rich make their money, or we will de-evolve into a third world-like situation with a few being wealthy and the rest in poverty.

Actually you may find that a third option is massive social breakdown leading to rioting and the rise of fringe political parties of all hues or even civil war. That my friend is the real posibility and the conundrum that all governments have faced since WWII. Anyone that thinks that the US or Europe will be able to compete with the tiger economies of Asia need to buy one of my bridges over the East river.

Originally posted by ofhumandescent
reply to post by Darkrunner

 

Yes plenty of people milk the system, but there is a whole new animal being born now. What was once the hard working middle class is systematically being destroyed.

You - yourself will not realize this until you find your job outsourced or insourced.

It's called lack of empathy and affects most people until the brown stuff hits their fan.

I donate two days a month to a soup kitchen, do you?

The people we use to get in line were drug addicts, mentally challenged, lazy and veterans that got screwed out of their full due.............now we are seeing people that were once "middle class", home owners, with kids, a car, a dog the whole American Dream that had one medical issue, one other issue like job loss(es) and all their hard work and striving was shot down.

And, it's not one or two thousand, read The Trillion Dollar Conspiracy, it's tens of millions now.

Again, next read, "Hostile Takeover" by David Sirota.

The enemy isn't so much over there as over here sitting in Washington DC.

edit on 1-12-2010 by ofhumandescent because: grammar

im not being funny but u keep banging on about the trillion dollar conspiracy and hostile take over by this fellow david sirota...now if i didnt know any better id say u were trying to plug his book....

Well, isnt this sick greedy and sinister..deciding tax cuts for the upper 2% while leaving its own citiznes to starve to death. and who said the NWO dosnt exist how arrogent, see hwat happens when CEO's and wallstreet got into congress...feels like sooner or later were all gunna pay, at our elected officals decisions

I find it ironic. My company has had open positions for months, without anybody applying. I know of several companies with the same problem. I keep getting calls wanting to know if I am looking for a job, because my resume is still up on Monster. I personally know of at least five people who are collecting unemployment and who are also working under the table.

Some of you need to stop drinking the DNC kool-aid. The Democrats are still in control of both houses of Congress and the White House. They can pass an extension anytime they want and there is nothing the GOP can do about it. You need to replace GOP in those previous posts with Democrats. I guess it isn't important enough to the Democrats to pass an extension.

sorry if this has been posted already but I had to stop reading when some posts became personal - but . . .
to try to make this a partisan "republicans are bad" scenario is foolish - during this Lame Duck session, please remember that the Democrats still have the majority and can pass anything that they want. - - THEY don't have the votes within their own party. So knock off the partisan stuff - and if you want to do it - then do it from a position of knowledge and state that it is the Dem's themselves that are stopping this.
Now to be a realist - there just aren't enough votes - period.

Originally posted by JIMC5499
I find it ironic. My company has had open positions for months, without anybody applying. I know of several companies with the same problem. I keep getting calls wanting to know if I am looking for a job, because my resume is still up on Monster. I personally know of at least five people who are collecting unemployment and who are also working under the table.

Well that may be but have you every thought that what some companies have is an expection to poach the exact candidate or person from a competitor? I only offer this, without arguement, simply because I have seen several agency job adverts where the criteria for shortlisting is completely unrealistic unless they are poaching from competitors. Anyway if the position has been open for several months is it still a necessary post? I am not picking a fight just questioning certian positions.

Originally posted by JustTheFacts
sorry if this has been posted already but I had to stop reading when some posts became personal - but . . .
to try to make this a partisan "republicans are bad" scenario is foolish - during this Lame Duck session, please remember that the Democrats still have the majority and can pass anything that they want. - - THEY don't have the votes within their own party. So knock off the partisan stuff - and if you want to do it - then do it from a position of knowledge and state that it is the Dem's themselves that are stopping this.
Now to be a realist - there just aren't enough votes - period.

So basically your saying that helping the poor and middle class should be a democrat issue exclusively...your happy to make this the mantra of the republican party then?

Republicans shall never help out the citizens of the united states for any reason...therefore, if there is any blame to be had, it is fully on the democrats...any failure is the lefts fault, because the right is not even a factor...they are counted on to always fail the people they represent.

Actually, I sort of agree with you here.

Originally posted by Kryties
reply to post by Darkrunner

 

Please then, enlighten us all as to your definition of the word 'many' and how it does not directly translate into 'millions' of people - considering of course you find disgust in 'many' of those that are on unemployment.

This should be good.......... I think I'll go grab some popcorn and enjoy this!

edit on 1/12/2010 by Kryties because: (no reason given)

Answer my question.

How long should unemployment benefits be extended? Another 99 weeks? Five years? Ten? More?

Originally posted by ofhumandescent
reply to post by Darkrunner

 

Yes plenty of people milk the system, but there is a whole new animal being born now. What was once the hard working middle class is systematically being destroyed.

You - yourself will not realize this until you find your job outsourced or insourced.

It's called lack of empathy and affects most people until the brown stuff hits their fan.

I donate two days a month to a soup kitchen, do you?

The people we use to get in line were drug addicts, mentally challenged, lazy and veterans that got screwed out of their full due.............now we are seeing people that were once "middle class", home owners, with kids, a car, a dog the whole American Dream that had one medical issue, one other issue like job loss(es) and all their hard work and striving was shot down.

And, it's not one or two thousand, read The Trillion Dollar Conspiracy, it's tens of millions now.

Again, next read, "Hostile Takeover" by David Sirota.

The enemy isn't so much over there as over here sitting in Washington DC.

edit on 1-12-2010 by ofhumandescent because: grammar

Yes, I have been unemployed. And I collected about 2 months of unemployment before I found work. My beef isn't with unemployment, it's with people that milk it for as long as they can before looking for work.

Regarding the soup kitchen, I've seen you mention this before, and I'm not sure what bearing this has on the topic of people milking unemployment benefits, but no, I don't volunteer, as I live in a town of about 3000 people. We don't even have a soup kitchen to my knowledge.

reply to post by SaturnFX

I used to think that ATS was neutral, that hot topics were simply pushed forward by algorithms, and you simply cannot interfere with that...now I see that is a falsehood. ATS is clearly a propaganda network for right wing conspiracy theories and political agendas

Funny you should mention that.

While I didn't see this, my husband who refuses to associate himself with ATS read some of the threads and stated exactly the same thing you did in this thread.

And, of the two of us, my husband is way smarter, he sees things much more clearly than I do, people wise.

I hear about all of these idle bums not wanting to find work. Does anyone have any figures to back this argument? I think that nationally it would be something like 5% of the unemployed have no intention of working. Even if it is 10 % it reflects the lumpen who cannot find any work due to no skills whatsoever and merely try to cover their inadequacy with the bluster and bravo of milking the system and not wanting a job (think of the fable of the fox and the grapes).

Here is the truth

It is deeply embarassing to be unemployed. If you have been on a salary or wage it is difficult to make ends meet on what they pay you. You are made to feel both stupid and a possibly fraudster. You have also let the government into your home. It is easier to get a job if youare already in work.

It has never been harder to just take a lower paid or low status job. Some friends of mine were told they were over-qualified or if they took the job they would leave when the economy picks up - when will this be?????

reply to post by SaturnFX

So there it is.
Blocked is unemployment compensation extension for millions..now they go without a couple hundred $ a week to survive.

Republicans have said they will -not- do anything else until the tax rate is decided on...which means, they are insisting the top 2% of the countrys wealthy get a massive tax cut extended.

There are a couple points missing from your information:

#1 When someone goes off unemployment compensation they go off the government radar and are not covered in the "unemployed statistics" That allows an apparent "recovery" because the RATE at which people are loosing jobs has slowed down, even though the NUMBER of people unemployed has actually really increase because they can not get a job. This statistical shell game is GOOD for the current Administration.

#2. Everyone falls for the RICH pay the most taxes fallacy:

PRESIDENT'S PRIVATE SECTOR SURVEY ON COST CONTROL
A REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT
VOLUME I
APPROVED BY THE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE AT
ITS MEETING ON JANUARY 15, 1984

Mr. President, you have been so correct in resisting attempts to balance the budget by increasing taxes. The tax load on the average American family is already at counterproductive levels with the underground economy having now grown to an estimated $500 billion per year, costing about $100 billion in lost Federal tax revenues per year.

The size of the underground economy is understandable when one considers that median family income taxes have increased from $9 in 1948 to $2,218 in 1983, or by 246 times. This is runaway taxation at its worst.

Importantly, any meaningful increases in taxes from personal income would have to come from lower and middle income families, as 90 percent of all personal taxable income is generated below the taxable income level of $35,000.

Further, there isn't much more that can be extracted from high income brackets. If the Government took 100 percent of all taxable income beyond the $75,000 tax bracket not already taxed, it would get only $17 billion, and this confiscation, which would destroy productive enterprise, would only be sufficient to run the Government for seven days.
www.uhuh.com...

Oh and WHERE do those taxes taken from the poor and middle class actually go???

WHY to the RICH of course

With two-thirds of everyone's personal income taxes wasted or not collected, 100 percent of what is collected is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services which taxpayers expect from their Government.

Federal Government contributions to transfer payments are the fees to transfer money from bank to bank. The Tax Payer gets stuck with that as well as the interest on the Debt paid to the Federal Reserve (private bankers)

I'm confused what this means? Some stations report that it cuts of benefits for people who have been on unemployment for more than 99 weeks and others say it cuts off benefits for people "up to 99 weeks". Which one is it? Who exactly is affected?