With the aforementioned plan in place, the U.S. umemployment will significantly drop. When, if and when it occurs, the U.S. unemployment rate drops to a reasonable level and maintains for 6 months, the aforemetioned tax and flat fee shall cease.

I fault the gooferment and it’s absolute stupidity.

First, average wage in gooferment is twice that of private industry. Regardless of how they slice and dice the numbers, gooferment workers are in the ascendancy in both quantity and money. TARP — bailout to the banks; should have just let them fail. (Cynically, I’d bet that they’d have figured out how to survive. The bail out of AIG was a direct payoff to Goldman Sachs. The same Goldman Sachs that paid gigantic bonuses.)

Second, every dollar the gooferment “gives” in unemployment benefits has to come from some taxpayer. Remember Basiat and the unseen victim. In this case, we now have four generation of “welfare farmers”. Some of those on “welfare” are rich companies and individuals. Milk and sugar subsidies come to mind.

Third, the poor economy has landed hard on the young and old. Youth unemployment — especially minority — is skyrocketing. And, the older workers are being forced into early retirement; some after burning through their savings from reduced retirement portfolios.

My solution is reduce gooferment. They need to cut, cut, and cut some more. Some entities need to be killed — Agriculture and Education would be my starting point. We need to cut the corporate income tax from 30+ to say ZERO. (Corporations don’t pay taxes. Only real people do. Corps pass them along or go out of business.) When Ron Paul campaigned, he asserted that cutting gooferment back to 1990 levels would allow the income tax to be ZERO.

Not like any of this is going to happen. But I wouldn’t trust anything the gooferment says or does. This included “running health care or health insurance”.
fjohn

On the plus side, the government has given a huge amount of additional assistance to the unemployed in the last year as part of the stimulus package, including several extensions to unemployment benefits and paying 50% of COBRA. I have a friend who was literally saved by these two programs but it seems most people barely know they exist.

Check out this Marketplace article on Urban Farming taking over vacant lots in Detroit:
Urban farming takes root in Detroit | Marketplace From American Public Media http://bit.ly/5MV7Fj. For more information or to donate, visit UrbanFarming.org.

It’s not as space-age as “WALL-e” but has a similar feel

To put on my pointy-hat for a second, in pure “economic” terms, you’re not unemployed unless you’re in the job market AND don’t have a job.

The way you determine if you’re “in the job market” is is the thing that’s up for grabs here, and economists, I feel, are doing the best they can to track this appropriately given a very hard-to-measure statistic. One way to track that is to follow unemployment insurance payments, however, if you’re getting unemployment benefits or not is NOT a requirement for the stat…. but its pretty hard to get people to “claim” unemployment without getting a benefit check after they’re done.

Usually, job service centers and state job placement agencies will try to determine flow of traffic in and out of their facilities or online registrants actively searching, etc., but then you could get a lot of duplication or human-errors and lots of other problems.

The only way to accurately count this would be to force every “unemployed” person to “check in” weekly, as if with a parole officer, to declare their current unemployment status–and some kind of penalty if you don’t do it. As if calling the state for unemployment assistance isn’t humiliating enough, having to “check-in” every week, even without the benefit of a little lump of cash to keep the lights on and put gas in the car to get to the next job fair.

Technically, if you stopped looking for a job, or went to school, or decided to do something else, you really are not in the job market from an economics standpoint. Also, if you got a part-time job or a temp job or a contract or started your own business, you are employed during that time.

This is why unemployment UNDER 4-5% is usually considered bad for the economy because there should be a reasonable amount of people in transition to keep the economy innovating and moving forward. When it gets below this–into the 2-3% range–it usually means the economy is, frankly, overheated, and that people that would otherwise really NOT WANT TO WORK are working because there are too many jobs or salaries are inflated or other things are happening. Its an indicator that a recession is imminent.

Blah blah blah.

Anyway, I do wish there were more accurate numbers to reflect the real human suffering out there. Like George Fulton said in the Detroit article you linked to, “It’s a big number, and we should be concerned about it whether it’s one in two or something less than that.”