Jobs and Unemployment Benefits

I highly recommend John Stossel’s excellent one-hour special from Saturday evening on the FoxNews Channel.

The focus of one of Stossel’s segments was the incentives around unemployment benefits.  He interviewed people who said they passed up jobs because the jobs paid less than they made on unemployment and they became more serious about looking at such jobs within a few weeks of their unemployment running out.

He also interviewed people who worked for the agency in charge of tracking the unemployed to ensure they were looking for work.  They said they could tell that some applicants didn’t take some jobs seriously.  They were interviewing in order to check the box to satisfy their requirement to keep receiving unemployment.

Stossel included footage of our President saying that he hasn’t met a single American that would rather collect an unemployment check  than have meaningful work to provide for their family.  Given Stossel’s evidence, it makes me wonder how hard the President looked or what questions he asked when he did look.

While watching the segment, the thought occurred to me that perhaps unemployment benefits should end once the person has been offered a job, even if the job pays less than the unemployment benefits.  Made me wonder what the true goals of unemployment are.  Is the goal to provide a safety net or to preserve a lifestyle that may not be preservable?

3 thoughts on “Jobs and Unemployment Benefits

  1. Pingback: Twitted by OurDinnerTable

  2. Pingback: Jobs and Unemployment Benefits « Our Dinner Table | The Daily Conservative

  3. The definitive solution to unemployment already exists. – Do you want to know how? Watch Zeitgeist Addendum NOW at



You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s