I would add:buying Cigarette’s and Booze, the money could have helped pay for some of her groceries! That came to a little under $30.00!
You seem to see things from the extremes. There is a whole world in between scavenging for honey from the trees and “being owed the best”. Reality lies in the shades of gray in between.
I could not possibly disagree more.
Do you demand a personal expression of slobbering, tearful gratitude in return for your helping someone? 
Well…
…nnnnnope. Not going there.
That’s the trouble with today’s jobless- not enough grovelling.
I was conscripted to work with Unemployment Insurance after Hurricane Katrina, so I am pretty familiar with it. Now, I work directly with employers providing them with incentive programs and grants which allow them to better train their employees and the grants may allow them to hire applicants they may not have thought they could afford. And at one point, conducted surveys with the US Bureau of Labor Statistic. As you can see, I am pretty well versed in this subject.
After all that, I’m not going to tell you anything most of you, outside OP’s plight, don’t already know. Like any action taken by government, it will be helpful and beneficial to some and not so much to others. Far too many people receiving UI benefits wait until their benefits have expired before they start to make honest attempts to find a job. Unless you have experience or a degree in a demand occupation, finding a job that you would be happy doing can take 6 months or better. Also, the point others have made about holes in your job history is a valid one. Taking a job below your skill level may need to be considered. It may make things more difficult in the present, but should payoff down the road.
I do feel bad for the OP and his situation, but overall it is better to limit UI benefits except, perhaps, during the worst economic conditions.
Suggestions for the OP: UI is not the only source of assistance. If you lost your last job due to foreign completion, TAA funds might be available. TAA will pay for further education (in a growth industry) and may even supply a stipend for living expenses. If you lost your job due to no fault of your own, you may be eligible for the NEG grant. For both of these, you need to contact your nearest WIA office which is typically imbedded with your local Workforce Commission or Dept. of Labor. Please consider contacting different staffing agencies in your area. Most companies use these agencies as the only way that they hire prospective employees. If you have some private questions, feel free to PM me.
Correct me if I’m misunderstanding you, Doyle, but it looks like this:
Is your rationale for concluding that
Is that right?
I’m not convinced it follows. I absolutely accept that some people hang out without “honestly” looking for a new gig until their benefits expire. But how many? What’s the percentage? And what percentage justifies what reduction in benefit time?
(For that matter, how do we effectively determine what constitutes an “honest” attempt to find work?)
Perhaps I should qualify this by stating that this is my opinion based on my experience in the state of Louisiana.
I do know that in Louisiana the average UI recipient receives 18 of 26 weeks of benefits and Louisiana has the lowest (or nearly lowest) benefits is the US at only $249 a week. Can you imagine how longer people will use the benefits in states that pay substantially more? My cousin in NC gets $700 per week. I know that he won’t seriously be looking until that about runs out.
As for “honestly” looking for a job, that one is nearly impossible to determine due to staffing issues. In LA, recipients must post 5 jobs they applied for every week. Checking to see if that was actually done is impossible. I also don’t think most of these people do it purposely. They’re usually so stunned that after loosing their job that it takes a few months for it to really sink in.
Your cousin is an extraordinarily clever slacker, as the max benefit in NC is $350.
Just going by what he told me, but I do stand corrected.
However, this site shows the benefits to be $535 and for 99 weeks.
Another thing. There are times when extra federal benefits can be added to weekly state benefits.
Starting your own business is not something everyone can do and shouldn’t be held against them as some sort of flaw. I excelled in my career because of my talent, intellect and willingness to work hard but I know I’m not cut out to run a business.
Some people are entrepreneurs, some people work for them - I’ve always referred to myself as ‘The Power Behind the Throne’ (and I have been powerful), I’m fine with that.
In my world not asking for help when you need it is stupid. Do you want an award for your suffering or something? Does starving make you feel virtuous or something?
What makes you think that aid recipients today aren’t grateful for the help? I’m glad that there is a program where people can eat regularly instead of going without food every weekend. I think that’s the way the world should be.
Oh? Really? Let’s roll the tape.
You’re talking about higher taxes and higher spending. That’s a balanced budget multiplier (which doesn’t necessarily imply balanced budgets). Still, I should hold back the snark: it’s not a major economic term.
LOL: yeah, that’s really a doozy. Martin Hyde’s feelings trump econometric estimates by professional economic forecasters. Good to know! And a fine exemplar of the modern conservative mentality: their lizard brains trump all of empirical reality.
Speaking of empirical reality, there’s an economist at AEI (you know, the conservative think tank that provides sinecures for washed out Republican Congressmen, including Newt Gingrich in the past) who thinks that conservatives should be interested in long term unemployment. He’s not getting many takers from that end of the cerebral spectrum. But there’s a decent chart which shows the share of the unemployed that’s long term. Yeah, it’s the worst in post war history, not surprisingly as this is the worst depression since the Great One of the 1930s. http://www.aei.org/article/economics/fiscal-policy/labor/heres-why-conservatives-should-worry-more-about-long-term-unemployment/
Lots of material, but here’s one snippet: BP: You’ve written before that if you look at the types of workers who actually make up the long-term unemployed, it’s hard to believe that they’re just refusing to find work to keep their benefits. What makes you say this?
MS: I was trying to find a way to illustrate the theory for people who aren’t technical experts. If you look at the long-term unemployed, a good chunk of them have children. A good chunk are married. A good chunk are college-educated or have had some college and in their prime earning years.
And it just seems to me — and, again, this is consistent with the research — that someone who has been unemployed for 30 or 35 or 40 weeks, and is in their prime earning years with kids and education. … It strikes me as implausible that this person is engaged in a half-hearted job search. Maybe if they’d been unemployed for five weeks, you can imagine that maybe they’re being too choosy, or maybe they’re just enjoying their time with their kids. But for there to be a significant number of long-term unemployed who aren’t engaged in a job search because of their unemployment checks … that just strikes me as implausible. Emphasis added.
1a. The safety net was quite a bit weaker during the Great Depression. As a result, we had unemployment that reached about 20%. It’s fair to say that without automatic stabilizers (eg higher food stamps and welfare during bad times) and stimulus that we would have had similar levels of depression in 2008-2013.
1b. So you should be grateful to the economists and policy makers who set all that up. Including, not to put too fine a point on it, social security and medicare. Your generation takes out far more of those programs than they have put in.
2a. I cut the survivors of the Great Depression a lot of slack: in 1929 there was no general model of the entire economy, only models of individual markets. Hoover and FDR were flying blind. And the citizenry was caught in a terrible economic environment not of their own making.
2b. That said, as a taxpayer I very much want infants, toddlers and pregnant women to have adequate nutrition. Those whose main asset was a strong back used to be able to make a decent living. No more: today’s American workers must depend upon their brain power. So we all have an interest in early childhood nutrition. And this taxpayer looks dimly on those who would deprive their children of good food out of a sense of misplaced pride.
Let me see if I have this straight. Donald Trump is your “Welfare Papa” poster model of why food stamps for poor people is a bad idea. :smack:
I’m sometimes in favor of simplifications and generalizations, but methinks this one goes too far.
There’s a popular misconception that the economy is a morality play.
It really isn’t. Think of it as a mechanism, some of whose aspects can be understood and calibrated. With error, as distressing as that notion may seem from the armchair. Other aspects, such as the linkages between high finance and great downturn, are imperfectly grasped, though we have a demonstrably better idea than we did in 2006. Hard experience and all that.
Total change of subject here, but nobody seems to acknowledge that those people who worked on the books paid taxes to support unemployment insurance.
Like health insurance, we hope we don’t need it but when we do we really need it. In my experience, the unemployment shock sets in at about 2 months. In my case it took me 23 months to find a new job as an architect. I interviewed for other jobs (oriental rug sales, home improvement representative) and applied for hundreds of others but I never applied for a job at McDonald’s.
People on unemployment aren’t doing okay, they’re spending down their savings and they’re aware that every week they aren’t working means a bigger hit to their bank account - and that’s the one’s who had savings to begin with. I had to cash in a huge part of my 401K to get by, which, of course I paid taxes on.
I also paid taxes on my unemployment benefits which were funded in part by the payroll taxes I paid. I never understood why I had to pay taxes for what I was taxed for.
I work with a food pantry sorting and prepping for pickup days. I call bull shit on any food pantry turning down anything that isn’t blatantly rotten. And I do mean absolutely blatantly rotten because I’ve sorted the rotten fruits and vegetables that were less than fresh in order to pull the stuff that was too bad to risk that our customers would eat them, so they could be sent to a farmer’s pigs.
I have never heard of a food pantry being so over stocked that they would turn away anything that their customers might find useful.