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Should be titled: "Wanker Libertarian Rich Guy Complains About Poor People Getting $100-$400 Per Week In Taxable Income". I would guess the mortgage interest s

Should be titled: "Wanker Libertarian Rich Guy Complains About Poor People Getting $100-$400 Per Week In Taxable Income". I would guess the mortgage interest subsidy the government gives to Phil Greenspun for his house(s) rather significantly exceeds the payments made to anyone receiving unemployment insurance. Which of course is INSURANCE in the first place - the employee pays for it while working, and then receives it, when not working. MIT receives something close to a billion dollars per year in government funding. Phil Greenspun is eating a lot more of that government cheese than anyone receiving unemployment insurance. But self-awareness is not a common trait among the libertarian programmer mindset. So, everyone on unemployment should just take a MIT course to learn SQL for web apps. No problem, except it costs $50K to attend MIT. Hmmm. Well, you could just take one course. How much would it cost to take a three-day course with five skilled teachers ( http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2011 http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2011 )? Maybe $2000? How many weeks of unemployment payments at $100-$400 per week would I have to save up to pay for that course? What precisely will I eat during those weeks? There's quote attributed to Marie Antoinette where she advised the poor, lacking bread, to simply consume cake instead. The modern version is the Wall Street Journal's criticism of Lucky Duckies - those folks so "lucky" in their income levels that the government declines to tax said income directly (of course they pay more in taxes relative to their income than any millionaire, but that fact is conveniently omitted). Such statements display a total lack of knowledge - not only does Greenspun not know what he's talking about, but he doesn't know that he doesn't know. http://gocomics.typepad.com/tomthedancingbugblog/2010/07/lucky-ducky-day.html http://gocomics.typepad.com/tomthedancingbugblog/2010/07/luc...

JoeAltmaier 16y ago
And to take the class, you still need to pay the rent, feed the kids, bus fare. Still, why not encourage training for the unemployed? But if you don't pay 100% for it, the unemployed are in no position to take you up on it.
- cosgroveb 16y ago
  I was unemployed for awhile in 2008 and I can confirm that Illinois at least has work training programs for the unemployed. I can't attest to whether or not they are any good as I had marketable skills at the time.
- chokma 16y ago
  After university, I was unemployed for a time and two things helped me to find new jobs and dramatically improve my income level: a) learning Perl on my own during the unemployment period* and writing two open source programs, thus demonstrating my skill with the language and impressing my first employer; b) getting a three month state-paid Java course (SCJP) and getting to know the Java-API and environment. Self-motivation, training, a certain amount of luck - there are numerous factors to getting a good job. For some lazy slobs, it may be getting their welfare money reduced. But for others it may be getting a longer period of welfare and training so they can learn something new which allows them "to do what they love". I think it is not enough to talk about getting people into any kind of job, as if having a job, no matter what, is sufficient or necessary to justify their existence. We need to help people get into the right jobs, and those jobs need to be paid fair wages. * Programming was(is) more fun than playing DAoC all day.
watchandwait 16y ago
Yes, the first 26 weeks are insurance, but the remaining weeks are federal welfare checks paid for with borrowed money.
- tptacek 16y ago
  It is a huge oversimplification to say that unemployment benefits are "paid with borrowed money". There is an economic calculation that pairs with the humane calculation behind unemployment benefits. To wit: people are not going to be allowed to starve in any case (there is a floor to our society's capability of being coldly rational). Furthermore, becoming homeless imposes additional costs across the economy (simplest case: the direct expense of eviction, lost rent; more generally, deadweight loss to the whole economy). Finally, if a significant portion of those in the "welfare check" phase of unemployment will end up employed, but would not end up consistently employed without that cushion, society has to factor in the cost of additional long-term unemployed people.
  - rmk 16y ago
    I think it's okay to extend unemployment benefits to a longer period, but 99 weeks looks like it is excessive. Also, perhaps, people who spend longer than the 26 weeks on unemployment benefits should be taxed at a higher rate when they gain employment. It's a little like the risk-based system used in insurance. The risk that your reservation wage increases probably increases with the time you spend getting benefits, so just tweak future taxes based on that risk.
jerf 16y ago
"Wanker Liberal Internet Commenter Offended That Government Dollars Should Carry Accountability - Just Shower Them With Dollars, Taxpayers Don't Mind, Macroeconomic Effects Irrelevant! Commenter Says" See, I can play the "jam words in somebody's mouth" game too. Out of curiosity, did you spend even a fraction of a second grappling with the hard questions raised by the post, or did you just jump straight to ad hominem? The question of whether we are burning immense wealth paying people to not work is a very important one. I personally know two people who deliberately did not take jobs because they knew they could stay on unemployment, and I am not very social and don't really know all that many people to this degree. Is that really what this stuff is for? Maybe it's OK to grapple with that question just a wee bit, given that we're a few trillion in debt?
- wonderzombie 16y ago
  "I personally know two people who deliberately did not take jobs because they knew they could stay on unemployment" The plural of anecdote is not data. :) Furthermore, unemployment insurance is something people pay into in the first place. I imagine it's not setting the government back a heck of a lot more than, say, the Bush tax cuts. And cutting off people's ability to pay for rent, food, and a car seems like a pretty poor way of getting out of a recession. The fact is that millions of jobs have been lost and they haven't come back. I guess ~9% unemployment is the new normal, though— them's that got shall get, and those that don't deserve whatever happens to 'em because they're lazy. If they weren't lazy, they'd pull themselves up by their bootstraps, ???, profit! I have to ask a serious question here: what's the endgame here? You cut off unemployment insurance. What happens to the people who suddenly have _no_ money? Is the answer "not my problem"? I can't imagine how Americans expect to "win the future" if their default reaction to an entire class of their countrymen reads like Ebenezer Scrooge.
  - jerf 16y ago
    "The plural of anecdote is not data." I'm not claiming it is. The point is that it's not a theoretical concern. It only takes one instance to show existence, I was actually being generous and giving two. "And cutting off people's ability to pay for rent, food, and a car seems like a pretty poor way of getting out of a recession." Second order effects, second order effects, second order effects. You are making the common-sense assumption that if you cut people's benefits off, they will simply have less money, and not change their behavior at all. That's not how it works. Common sense is not just wrong, it is pathologically wrong when thinking about the economy. "what's the endgame here?" Total economic collapse if we don't stop spending so much money on destroying wealth, no matter how good it makes you feel to do it. This is only a particular case of the general trend. You are also assuming that leaving people without unemployment assistance is more or less the worse-case scenario, and so I'm leading them into the worst case. It's not. Leaving people with no economy in which to get a job and no economy with which to give them assistance of any kind, government or voluntary, is, and that is distressingly close to on the table. How will a collapsed United States dollar render unemployment assistance? You have to think about the full consequences, not just the consequences to one particular instance of the problem at one particular point in time. I personally strongly believe with what I believe to be good reason that all of this soft-headed money spending and wealth destruction is far worse for everybody that tightening our belts and making people work for things, so I reject your attempt at moral authority. The problem of not having enough wealth for everybody can not be solved by policies that destroy yet more wealth and we are perilously close to a wealth-destruction death spiral here, if we're not already in one, all in the name of helping people while actually utterly burying them. It's your policies that lead to ruination, not mine.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
How much would it cost to take a three-day course with five skilled teachers ( http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2011 http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2011 )? Maybe $2000? If only Greenspun had thought this through - then he might have suggested something like this: for people who’ve been unemployed for 12 weeks, simply pay for a year of education in programs with proven records of skills-building (I guess you measure by how many finished and were able to get jobs) I guess ad-hominem attacks are a lot easier than addressing Greenspun's simple economic question: "Is the 99-weeks-of-Xbox system that Congress created more sensible than it seems?"
- tptacek 16y ago
  There are ~15MM unemployed people in the United States. Let's say we want to improve the lot of 20% of those people. To what program can we direct 3MM people for a year of skills-building that will result in those people, with some degree of certainty, becoming employable?
  - yummyfajitas 16y ago
    I'm not endorsing Greenspun's plan, I'm just pointing out that the original poster didn't even bother to read Greenspun's blog post. I'm personally a proponent of imposing unpleasant conditions on unemployment insurance to reduce moral hazard and make minimally productive use of the unemployed. For example, we can build a physical (rather than virtual) border fence with mexico with labor costs close to zero - we do is select random able-bodied unemployed people and make working on the border fence a condition of receiving further benefits. (Or similar projects - for example, we can reduce the waiting time at the DMV to 0.)
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Is your answer to my question, "I can't think of one"?
      - yummyfajitas 16y ago

JoeAltmaier 16y ago

And to take the class, you still need to pay the rent, feed the kids, bus fare. Still, why not encourage training for the unemployed? But if you don't pay 100% for it, the unemployed are in no position to take you up on it.

cosgroveb 16y ago
I was unemployed for awhile in 2008 and I can confirm that Illinois at least has work training programs for the unemployed. I can't attest to whether or not they are any good as I had marketable skills at the time.
chokma 16y ago
After university, I was unemployed for a time and two things helped me to find new jobs and dramatically improve my income level: a) learning Perl on my own during the unemployment period* and writing two open source programs, thus demonstrating my skill with the language and impressing my first employer; b) getting a three month state-paid Java course (SCJP) and getting to know the Java-API and environment. Self-motivation, training, a certain amount of luck - there are numerous factors to getting a good job. For some lazy slobs, it may be getting their welfare money reduced. But for others it may be getting a longer period of welfare and training so they can learn something new which allows them "to do what they love". I think it is not enough to talk about getting people into any kind of job, as if having a job, no matter what, is sufficient or necessary to justify their existence. We need to help people get into the right jobs, and those jobs need to be paid fair wages. * Programming was(is) more fun than playing DAoC all day.

watchandwait 16y ago

Yes, the first 26 weeks are insurance, but the remaining weeks are federal welfare checks paid for with borrowed money.

tptacek 16y ago
It is a huge oversimplification to say that unemployment benefits are "paid with borrowed money". There is an economic calculation that pairs with the humane calculation behind unemployment benefits. To wit: people are not going to be allowed to starve in any case (there is a floor to our society's capability of being coldly rational). Furthermore, becoming homeless imposes additional costs across the economy (simplest case: the direct expense of eviction, lost rent; more generally, deadweight loss to the whole economy). Finally, if a significant portion of those in the "welfare check" phase of unemployment will end up employed, but would not end up consistently employed without that cushion, society has to factor in the cost of additional long-term unemployed people.
- rmk 16y ago
  I think it's okay to extend unemployment benefits to a longer period, but 99 weeks looks like it is excessive. Also, perhaps, people who spend longer than the 26 weeks on unemployment benefits should be taxed at a higher rate when they gain employment. It's a little like the risk-based system used in insurance. The risk that your reservation wage increases probably increases with the time you spend getting benefits, so just tweak future taxes based on that risk.

jerf 16y ago

"Wanker Liberal Internet Commenter Offended That Government Dollars Should Carry Accountability - Just Shower Them With Dollars, Taxpayers Don't Mind, Macroeconomic Effects Irrelevant! Commenter Says" See, I can play the "jam words in somebody's mouth" game too. Out of curiosity, did you spend even a fraction of a second grappling with the hard questions raised by the post, or did you just jump straight to ad hominem? The question of whether we are burning immense wealth paying people to not work is a very important one. I personally know two people who deliberately did not take jobs because they knew they could stay on unemployment, and I am not very social and don't really know all that many people to this degree. Is that really what this stuff is for? Maybe it's OK to grapple with that question just a wee bit, given that we're a few trillion in debt?

wonderzombie 16y ago
"I personally know two people who deliberately did not take jobs because they knew they could stay on unemployment" The plural of anecdote is not data. :) Furthermore, unemployment insurance is something people pay into in the first place. I imagine it's not setting the government back a heck of a lot more than, say, the Bush tax cuts. And cutting off people's ability to pay for rent, food, and a car seems like a pretty poor way of getting out of a recession. The fact is that millions of jobs have been lost and they haven't come back. I guess ~9% unemployment is the new normal, though— them's that got shall get, and those that don't deserve whatever happens to 'em because they're lazy. If they weren't lazy, they'd pull themselves up by their bootstraps, ???, profit! I have to ask a serious question here: what's the endgame here? You cut off unemployment insurance. What happens to the people who suddenly have _no_ money? Is the answer "not my problem"? I can't imagine how Americans expect to "win the future" if their default reaction to an entire class of their countrymen reads like Ebenezer Scrooge.
- jerf 16y ago
  "The plural of anecdote is not data." I'm not claiming it is. The point is that it's not a theoretical concern. It only takes one instance to show existence, I was actually being generous and giving two. "And cutting off people's ability to pay for rent, food, and a car seems like a pretty poor way of getting out of a recession." Second order effects, second order effects, second order effects. You are making the common-sense assumption that if you cut people's benefits off, they will simply have less money, and not change their behavior at all. That's not how it works. Common sense is not just wrong, it is pathologically wrong when thinking about the economy. "what's the endgame here?" Total economic collapse if we don't stop spending so much money on destroying wealth, no matter how good it makes you feel to do it. This is only a particular case of the general trend. You are also assuming that leaving people without unemployment assistance is more or less the worse-case scenario, and so I'm leading them into the worst case. It's not. Leaving people with no economy in which to get a job and no economy with which to give them assistance of any kind, government or voluntary, is, and that is distressingly close to on the table. How will a collapsed United States dollar render unemployment assistance? You have to think about the full consequences, not just the consequences to one particular instance of the problem at one particular point in time. I personally strongly believe with what I believe to be good reason that all of this soft-headed money spending and wealth destruction is far worse for everybody that tightening our belts and making people work for things, so I reject your attempt at moral authority. The problem of not having enough wealth for everybody can not be solved by policies that destroy yet more wealth and we are perilously close to a wealth-destruction death spiral here, if we're not already in one, all in the name of helping people while actually utterly burying them. It's your policies that lead to ruination, not mine.

yummyfajitas 16y ago

How much would it cost to take a three-day course with five skilled teachers ( http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2011 http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/rdbms-iap-2011 )? Maybe $2000? If only Greenspun had thought this through - then he might have suggested something like this: for people who’ve been unemployed for 12 weeks, simply pay for a year of education in programs with proven records of skills-building (I guess you measure by how many finished and were able to get jobs) I guess ad-hominem attacks are a lot easier than addressing Greenspun's simple economic question: "Is the 99-weeks-of-Xbox system that Congress created more sensible than it seems?"

tptacek 16y ago
There are ~15MM unemployed people in the United States. Let's say we want to improve the lot of 20% of those people. To what program can we direct 3MM people for a year of skills-building that will result in those people, with some degree of certainty, becoming employable?
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  I'm not endorsing Greenspun's plan, I'm just pointing out that the original poster didn't even bother to read Greenspun's blog post. I'm personally a proponent of imposing unpleasant conditions on unemployment insurance to reduce moral hazard and make minimally productive use of the unemployed. For example, we can build a physical (rather than virtual) border fence with mexico with labor costs close to zero - we do is select random able-bodied unemployed people and make working on the border fence a condition of receiving further benefits. (Or similar projects - for example, we can reduce the waiting time at the DMV to 0.)
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Is your answer to my question, "I can't think of one"?
    - yummyfajitas 16y ago