Unemployment Encouraged by the Benefits?

Terms to Know(provided by Google):
*Unemployment benefits-payments made to people who are unemployed
*Extended benefits-"additional Federally funded weeks of benefits paid during periods of high unemployment as provided by the US Congress"
*recession-the state of a declined economy


Some research shows that receiving unemployment benefits has little to do with those who are unemployed. Although some debaters believed that people found it easy to be unemployed and chose to stay that way due to the benefits they were receiving, economists Rob Valletta and Katherine Kuang prove otherwise.

They stated,"We calculate that, in the absence of extended benefits, the unemployment rate would have been about 0.4 percentage points lower at the end of 2009, or about 9.6% rather than 10%." This shows that the effects of the recession are still prominent within the unemployment rate of our country. San Francisco Federal Chief, Janet Yellen, predicts that it will take until about 2011 to get the unemployment rate down to 8% from the current 10%. This long period of recovery shows that we won't truly be out of our recession until our unemploymet rate goes down. Fortunately there have been 162,000 jobs added since March, which marks some progress.

Unemployment exists due to the many layoffs and paycuts and job cuts as a result of the recession. Businesses had to keep themselves afloat by cutting of jobs for people that otherwise would have received money. Job cuts won't last forever, but as long as this recession recovery lasts, businesses will be trying to keep themselves alive while jobs can be offered from other places.

I think that it will take a long time to recover from this recession, but as long as jobs are steadily available, more people will be employed and the unemployment rate will go down.

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/04/19/dont-blame-unemployment-extension-for-high-jobless-rate/