Hey Delay and Kyl: Unemployment is Worker Money, not Welfare!

Want the Republicans back in power? Are you buying into the tea party push for smaller government? Do you want government out of your life? Are you longing for the day business can make your decisions for you, without the hassle of forcing government officials to listen to your complaints?

Are you selfishly taking the government handout of unemployment insurance, your money? Yes, it's your money paid by your employer. But Tom Delay and Jon Kyl don't know that!

Mikecheck/Rawstory: Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Delay told CNN Sunday that the reason people are unemployed today is because they want to be. Calling Sen. Jim Bunning "brave" for blocking an extension of unemployment benefits for 1.1 million struggling Americans, Bunning told Candy Crowley, "there is an argument to be made that these extensions, the unemployment benefits keep people from going and finding jobs."

The incredulous Crowley asked, "People are unemployed...because they want to be?" Answered DeLay, "Well, it is the truth. And people in the real world know it."

We're assuming he's *not* talking about the 14.9 unemployed Americans searching for work in the "Real World."

The Frustrated Teacher found this piece on the hardship of unemployment:

Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, in the U.K., and a pioneer in the field of happiness studies, says no other circumstance produces a larger decline in mental health and well-being than being involuntarily out of work for six months or more. It is the worst thing that can happen, he says, equivalent to the death of a spouse, and “a kind of bereavement” in its own right. Only a small fraction of the decline can be tied directly to losing a paycheck, Oswald says; most of it appears to be the result of a tarnished identity and a loss of self-worth. Unemployment leaves psychological scars that remain even after work is found again, and, because the happiness of husbands and the happiness of wives are usually closely related, the misery spreads throughout the home.

Especially in middle-aged men, long accustomed to the routine of the office or factory, unemployment seems to produce a crippling disorientation. At a series of workshops for the unemployed that I attended around Philadelphia last fall, the participants were overwhelmingly male, and the men in particular described the erosion of their identities, the isolation of being jobless, and the indignities of downward mobility.