Why are drug testing and GED classes considered 'poison pills'?
Unfunded mandates maybe, but no one seems to be couching the argument in those terms.

Poison pills in the sense that House Republicans want to force the president to sign a bill which kills people, lines the pockets of Koch Industries and kicks people off unemployment.

This, the theory goes, would make Obama look bad.

Maybe I'm dense on this issue, but, i don't see any problem with mandating that someone cannot draw unemployment unless they show they are not using drugs, or obtaining a minimal education level as 'retraining.' I don't see how these things would 'kill people' or 'line the pockets of Koch Industries'. They probably would kick a few people off unemployment--those who refuse to participate in minimal educational retraining, or who choose to squander their weekly benefits on drugs.

So, I ask again, what exactly is the problem (with those two particular items)?

a) The grab bag of punitive douchebaggery is unrelated to the payroll tax cut.
b) Should anyone who performs services for a government entity be subjected to periodic and/or random drug testing? I see a great deal more logic in that from a public policy standpoint than in testing the unemployed.
c) The Keystone pipeline is designed to enrich the Koch Brothers.
d) Environmental deregulation kills far more people than Al-Qaeda ever did.
e) What good would training and drug testing for nonexistent jobs do? We have unemployment in this country because there are no jobs. Not because the unemployed lack the skills or work habits to perform.

Here's another way of looking at the problem with the teaparty bill.

Either people are unemployed because they are lazy ignorant drug addicts, or they are unemployed because the macroeconomy needs stimulus in the form of increased pollution and environmental sacrifice.

You can't have it both ways, but that is exactly what you must believe to think this bill is useful.

Sounds like a false premise to me. Neither of your assertions is necessarily either accurate or exclusive.

I merely question why two items that are related to federal unemployment extension funding are considered poison pills. The other items in your original post clearly are poison pills (to Dems, at least), and are likely on the House agenda because there was some outside chance Obama might accept them. Look at his track record. Don't be surprised when these items surface in negotiations again.

At any rate, states pay what, the first 6 or 12 months of unemployment benefits, then federal funding extensions kick in? While there are obviously national/global economic depression issues at play in the high unemployment rate, I suspect it is also fair to say that the lazier or less skilled workers tend to draw unemployment longer. Thus, a federal interest in forcing members of that subgroup to get clean, or improve their educational level so they can qualify for a broader range of jobs.

That is just a small part of what should be done, and it is no surprise to me that the Repugs won't discuss the easier solution of major public works funding. Of course, it was a major disappointment to me when Obama chose to bail out wall street rather than throw everything at major public works funding a couple years ago.

It may make sense from a social policy standpoint to raise the aggregate level of education, ambition and cleanliness, but it has no real relevance to overall employment.

If you raise all the 13.3 million unemployed americans to a uniform level of education and sobriety, that doesn't change the fact that only 103,000 (8% of them) will get jobs this month.

It's funny how the invisible hand of the free market is abandoned when that means not poking people with the +2 stick of punitive sanctimoniousness.

To believe that the two beliefs are not exclusive one must accept that 19 million people became lazy unemployable drug addicts since 1999.

In the short term, you are correct. Sobriety and education do nothing to cut the unemployment rate. Major public works funding is the obvious solution.

In the long haul, however, once we are out of this depression, elevating the skill set of the unemployed should, or at least could, shorten the period of time the average individual draws benefits, thus allowing fewer federal funds to be spent on extended benefits. So, those elements of the House Repug bill do have some merit, even if only marginally relevant in today's market. That does not make those elements poison pills.

Agree.



Disagree.

To avoid inflation, a "wage and price spiral", the primary knob the fed adjusts has the effect of dialing the unemployment rate up and down. At no point will they allow the dial to read zero, therefore workers will always be competing with one another for available jobs. The higher skill worker will get the job over the lower skill worker. Elevating the skills of the latter simply gives him/her a competitive advantage against the former, their average length of unemployment remains the same, given unchanged economic conditions.

This is only defensible on the basis that improving the skills of society in general is useful to improve global competitiveness, and that's obviously not a priority - doing marginally well enough but cheaper is.

Just some questions.

With college funding being cut, would there be enough space in GED programs?

Who pays for tuition and books?

If someone has a high school diploma, I would assume they are exempt from this or is there a requirement that they get additional education?

I am shrugging. I dunno, it's not my stupid idea.

But your questions suggest that anyone cares enough to invent an answer. The whole point is to poke unemployed people with a stick. That stick is pointier if there's no way for the victim to avoid it.

But it turns out that the house Republicans capitulated in their demands last night, so we don't have to worry about this for two months.

I get the problem with the stick. However, I think education for the most disadvantaged of the unemployed makes sense. I just don't think they can make it work with so many states cutting back education dollars.

And are they really so dumb to think all unemployed don't have diplomas? Apparently so.

It's cognitive dissonance. They've been praying in the church of trickle-down so long that it's now an element of faith. They know that cutting taxes for the rich works because if the "job creators" have a bunch of extra cash laying around, they'll spend it on us. Like Phil Maher's "pinata of benevolence".

When it doesn't pan out, they scramble for explanations that don't threaten the fundamental faith, so "the problem is a lack of skills among the unemployed". It isn't the "job creators" fault, the argument goes, all that money they've placed in offshore banks isn't being spent on hiring simply because the unemployed are too stupid and drugged-up to pull his levers and turn his knobs.

Every year when micogoogleappleco inc, goes begging congress for more H1B visas for foreign techies, it's the same story; no one in the US has the specialized training. But here's the deal: most of those foreigners with specialized training were educated here, and mostly in public universities.

This kind of reminds me of "The Big Lie" in the NYT. Subject was a little different but the idea is the same. The Big Lie.

If the following is true:



how can we argue that taxing the rich solves anything. We have to tax everyone and spend less.

It appears we have a lot of "big" lies.

The reason that Samuelson picked the top 400 households is because they hold as much wealth as the bottom 60,000,000 households.

The economy is stagnant because of wealth concentration. Siezing it to pay creditors (the straw-man that Samuelson has constructed) wouldn't help, because his underlying frame is that the most important thing to do with 1.5 trillion is to pay off the debt that we borrowed from those 400 people.

Instead of borrowing money from the wealthy, it's better to tax it.

The deficit isn't the problem, the liquidity trap is.

Speaking of the problems with inequality;
Bowles offers a key reason why [inequality holds us back]. “Inequality breeds conflict, and conflict breeds wasted resources,” he says.
In short, in a very unequal society, the people at the top have to spend a lot of time and energy keeping the lower classes obedient and productive.
Inequality leads to an excess of what Bowles calls “guard labor.” In a 2007 paper on the subject (working paper here), he and co-author Arjun Jayadev, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, make an astonishing claim: Roughly 1 in 4 Americans is employed to keep fellow citizens in line and protect private wealth from would-be Robin Hoods.
The job descriptions of guard labor range from “imposing work discipline”—think of the corporate IT spies who keep desk jockeys from slacking off online—to enforcing laws, like the officers in the Santa Fe Police Department paddy wagon parked outside of Walmart.
The greater the inequalities in a society, the more guard labor it requires, Bowles finds. This holds true among US states, with relatively unequal states like New Mexico employing a greater share of guard labor than relatively egalitarian states like Wisconsin.
The problem, Bowles argues, is that too much guard labor sustains “illegitimate inequalities,” creating a drag on the economy. All of the people in guard labor jobs could be doing something more productive with their time—perhaps starting their own businesses or helping to reduce the US trade deficit with China.

http://aspiringeconomist.com/index.php/2010/02/04/guard-labor-why-is-inequality-bad/

One last thing;


Spending as a share of GDP is a matter of concern, but it doesn't merit the panic that it's getting.