-By Warner Todd Huston
Obama’s Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, recently gave a quixotic assessment of how many jobs were “saved” by Obama’s work in the White House. In fact, she felt it was the constant extension of unemployment benefits that somehow “saved” millions of jobs.
On a January 4 segment on CNBC, Solis maintained that the benefits “generate” spending in “the community.”
“…what I think about is, those 2 million people that would have lost their unemployment insurance. Because think about it, all that money that goes out in terms of what’s being spent by that unemployment check helps to generate two additional dollars back in the community. Everyone continues to keep their jobs. I can’t give you an exact figure, but I’ll tell you just by the movement that the President made, we’ve saved millions and millions of jobs,” Solis claimed.
This is, of course, a perfect example of the classic “broken windows fallacy.”
Unemployment payments are not positive spending that grows an economy. It is merely taking from one citizen to give to another without any added benefit to the community.
But, notice another common fallacy Solis indulged. She called the payments “unemployment insurance.” But, just as Social Security isn’t insurance, neither is unemployment compensation. Whatever its efficacy, unemployment payments is a type of a welfare program, not “insurance.”
Still, one has to wonder why CNBC even asked the Secretary of Labor questions on budget policy. The Department of Labor is not really involved in any meaningful way with the setting of budget policy, the Labor Sec. doesn’t have much impact in that discussion. Realistically, the DoL is only interested in tracking labor statistics and assisting the labor and business sectors to solve disputes and problems, not setting monetary and budget policies.
Interestingly, however, despite her claim that extending unemployment benefits “saved” millions of jobs, Solis both admitted that there is no real proof of this claim and that this jobs report didn’t much change over the last one. Through these admissions, Secretary Solis essentially admitted she was just disgorging talking points, not relaying facts.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
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