So I'm half tempted to invent an excuse as to why this is so late. Something like "Well I wanted to wait to do a Stupidest comment of the year blog" or something like that, and while this comment would qualify the honest truth is I'm late on this because I've been busy (read lazy).
Anyways as long time readers, or anyone who follows me on Facebook will know, I've long been collecting a list of things US Senator Rand Paul doesnt understand, and to be honest its an ever growing list.
Well the latest entry on the list of things from Senator Paul came late last year (or early last month if you prefer), when the federal budget deal was signed without an extension of unemployment benefits, which a lot of people were not happy about, given the still incredibly high number of people out of work.
Rand Paul however defended his vote as follows when asked by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday:
"I do support unemployment benefits for the 26 weeks that they're paid for. If you extend it beyond that, you do a disservice to these workers."
Now the thing you have to understand about Rand Paul is that he is a trained monkey. See you can train a monkey to throw darts at signs on a wall (by the way they have a stock market fund run on that very idea), but the Monkey doesnt actually understand what its doing, doesnt understand WHY it needs to do it, it just knows that if it throws the dart, it gets a banana. And see thats basically what Rand Paul is doing here, except that in his case, there is also a group who will give him a banana if he doesnt throw the dart.
Which is why in the space of two sentences he comes out for AND against unemployment insurance, he just wants both banana's for saying what both sets of people want to hear.
Now maybe you think I'm being a bit harsh, I mean Rand Paul does distinguish between unemployment before and after 26 weeks, by pointing out that unemployment is only paid for for up to 26 weeks. So presumably the disservice he's talking about is financial right? has something to do with increasing the debt now to fund unemployment isnt good, or something around those lines. Well you might think so, but you'd be WRONG. in his very next sentence Senator Paul says this:
"There was a study that came out a few months ago, and it said, if you have a worker that's been unemployed for four weeks and on unemployment insurance and one that's on 99 weeks, which would you hire? Every employer, nearly 100 percent, said they will always hire the person who's been out of work four weeks.
When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you're causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy. And it really -- while it seems good, it actually does a disservice to the people you're trying to help." "
And here's where it becomes clear Rand Paul is really just reaching for as many banana's (read: Support, campaign donations, votes) as possible and lacks the skill to decide which banana is bigger, which one he wants more, which would be more long term benefit to him or any other skill most people use when trying to decide their own self interest.
Now you note in the first two sentences Rand Paul is taking about <26 weeks vs >26 weeks, but from that point on out he's talking about 4 weeks vs 99 weeks.
Why the switch? well turns out Rand Paul pulled the 26 week number out of his ass....but its not an entirely random number. See turns out there are actually TWO types of unemployment, and the time you can stay on either varies from state to state. Now as it turns out in Kentucky the number of weeks you can stay on STATE based unemployment insurance is 26 weeks (the number of weeks you could hypothetically stay on any kind of unemployment in Kentucky is 63 weeks, every after week 26 is federal insurance). Take any other state and both of those numbers can change.
So basically in order to get the home state banana, Rand Paul gave the home state number.....even though his next sentence actually suggested 26 weeks would be bad.
See according to the study Paul cited he claims, the less time you collect unemployment the better, 4 weeks for example is better than 99. So by the same logic, 4 weeks is better that 26 so Kentucky should cut back on unemployment benefits.
In fact nothing Rand Paul has suggested does anything to defend the idea of 26 weeks being ideal, except that they are all ready paid for, which is his attempt to get the fiscal conservatives banana, since we cant fund things beyond the date they are already paid for. Granted the X number (depending on state) of weeks after state insurance runs out are also already paid for, but he cant acknowledge that, since doing so would cost him the banana's of the small government libertarian crowd who dont believe the government can or should do anything, paid for or not.
So in order to get all four of those banana's he has to take a random position he cant actually defend, and that his defense pokes holes in. The worst part about all of it though, is he has NO IDEA that is actually the case, he actually thinks he found a "legitimate" way to get all those banana's. Because he doesnt actually understand what his own information is telling him.
Maybe you caught it a few paragraphs up when I said "See according to the study Paul cited he claims, the less time you collect unemployment the better", but that's not actually correct. What the study actually says, is the less time your UNEMPLOYED the better. Collecting unemployment is used only as a way to measure how long the person has been unemployed.
By the same token the reason the 4 week person looks better than the 99 week person is because its believed the 99 week person has lost a much greater amount of their job skills, may need to be retrained, may not be as up to date as the 4 week person.
No employer looks at how long you took unemployment on your resume.....they look at how long you were out of work. In fact, in all the interviews I have ever had for any job ever, I've never once been asked how long I have been on or was on unemployment. I have however had to convince several people that the 4 year gap in my work record (from when I went to college) wasnt a real gap (because of college)....some werent convinced, and clearly since I was in college I wasnt getting unemployment.
But that simple fact is beyond Rand Paul, he seems to think based on the end his own statement ("When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you're causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy" )that if we take away people's unemployment at a number he randomly made up [26 weeks] people would be better off based on that fact alone on week 27 than if we didnt. Because in Rand Paul world, the only thing sitting between you and a magically created job is the fact that you have on your resume that you were on unemployment insurance over an arbitrarily picked length of time.
Now I will give Rand Paul credit for one thing, he is right, being unemployed for 99 weeks, heck being unemployed for 26 weeks is a problem we need to fix. But heck probability demands that even a monkey with a dart is right on occasion, MonkeyDex (the stock fund I mentioned earlier) massively outperformed the market in its first year of existence. But being right doesnt change the fact that its still a monkey with a dart, with no actual understanding of what its actually doing, and no real way to learn or change anything.
No comments:
Post a Comment