So, What Exactly Happens To The Long Term Unemployed?

The Article: Only 11% of the long-term unemployed find work again a year later by Ricardo Lopez in the Los Angeles Times.

The Text: In a sobering new study, three Princeton economists found that only 11% of the long-term unemployed in any given month found full-time work a year later.

The paper, presented Thursday at a Brookings Panel on Economic Activity, offered a comprehensive look at the profile of the long-term unemployed. The lead economist behind the study is Alan B. Krueger, the former chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors.
The economists tested the hypothesis of whether a low supply of jobs or discrimination by employers contributed to long-term unemployment.

The answer? Probably both.

“The demand-side and supply-side effects of long-term unemployment can be viewed as complementary and reinforcing of each other as opposed to competing explanations,” the economists wrote. “[S]tatistical discrimination against the long-term unemployed could lead to discouragement, and skill erosion that accompanies long-term unemployment could induce employers to discriminate against the long-term unemployed.”
One of the paper’s finding is that long-term unemployed people exert little pressure on parts of the economy such as wages and inflation.

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Libertarians: Conservatives’ Annoying, Attention-Seeking Little Brothers

Everything conservatives do, libertarians want to do better.

What Competition Really Means

If only things were actually this transparent.

The Conservative Myth Of A Social Safety Net Built On Charity

The Article: The Conservative Myth of a Social Safety Net Built on Charity by Mike Konczal in The Atlantic.

The Text: Ideology is as much about understanding the past as shaping the future. And conservatives tell themselves a story, a fairy tale really, about the past, about the way the world was and can be again under Republican policies. This story is about the way people were able to insure themselves against the risks inherent in modern life. Back before the Great Society, before the New Deal, and even before the Progressive Era, things were better. Before government took on the role of providing social insurance, individuals and private charity did everything needed to insure people against the hardships of life; given the chance, they could do it again.

This vision has always been implicit in the conservative ascendancy. It existed in the 1980s, when President Reagan announced, “The size of the federal budget is not an appropriate barometer of social conscience or charitable concern,” and called for voluntarism to fill in the yawning gaps in the social safety net. It was made explicit in the 1990s, notably through Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion, a treatise hailed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and William Bennett, which argued that a purely private nineteenth-century system of charitable and voluntary organizations did a better job providing for the common good than the twentieth-century welfare state. This idea is also the basis of Paul Ryan’s budget, which seeks to devolve and shrink the federal government at a rapid pace, lest the safety net turn “into a hammock that lulls able-bodied people into lives of dependency and complacency, that drains them of their will and their incentive to make the most of their lives.” It’s what Utah Senator Mike Lee references when he says that the “alternative to big government is not small government” but instead “a voluntary civil society.” As conservatives face the possibility of a permanent Democratic majority fueled by changing demographics, they understand that time is running out on their cherished project to dismantle the federal welfare state.

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Mitch McConnell Appears In The Shining

Even though the turtle-like senator basically ruined #Mcconnelling by publicly embracing it as “amusing”, the videos keep being churned out. For comparison’s sake, here’s the original. It’s also creepy as hell but made worse because it’s not by Kubrick: