Now, the House has already passed a bill that, by exempting the assets of couples up to $7 million, would leave 99.75 percent of estates tax-free. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for Mr. Kyl; he’s willing to hold up desperately needed aid to the unemployed on behalf of the remaining 0.25 percent.
Krugman: "In Mr. Kyl's view, then, what we really need to worry about right now - with more than five unemployed workers for every job opening, and long-term unemployment at its highest level since the Great Depression - is whether we're reducing the incentive of the unemployed to find jobs. To me, that's a bizarre point of view"
I recently saw some evidence presented that even in deep recessions, unemployment benefits reduces the willingness to work (the data show that about 30% of the unemployed in Pittsburgh were able to find work right when their benefits ran out in the early 1980s). Behind the numbers, there may be some sad details - people taking crappy jobs that they know they'll leave as soon as something better comes along, etc - but there's no denying that more people will remain unemployed if they receive benefits. Having said that, even the evidence suggests that most of the unemployed still couldn't find work shortly after the benefits expired, so it's hard to deny that the benefits are needed by most who receive them. We might be paying unemployment benefits to a significant number of people who could be working otherwise, but it's probably tough in practice to tell the difference between people who really need it and people who are choosing to take it over work.
this is weird. How come my comment doesn't show up here, but shows up here?
Wait. Now why does it show up here, but only without the proper comment count? Brian, the site's broken...
I think it's because I never coded the Delete to reset the counter, which is stored/maintained separately in a performance trade-off. Obviously I chose poorly.
