At National Review Jillian Kay Melchior describes how her own experience of unemployment benefits proved to her that "extending [unemployment benefits] contributes to the underlying economic problem." Now I have to say, I was hoping at the start that she'd try to excite her audience by telling us how she used your taxpayers dollars to buy Cadillacs and T-bone steaks. But alas, Melchior had a miserable time on UI. And it's easy to see why -- she doesn't seem cut out for the vagaries of everyday life:
I lost my job in January 2011. It was my first permanent job out of college, and losing it was mentally and financially traumatic. I spent the cab ride home, box in hands, fighting tears, and then worrying that I should have taken the subway instead because taxis are expensive and my income source had just vanished.I think my first "permanent" job in New York was as a messenger, and while losing it was financially disadvantageous, I wasn't "traumatized" so much as momentarily hassled, then stoked that I didn't have to get up early the next day. And I wasn't even getting unemployment! That would have made it an awesome day. (I haven't collected UI since the early 90s. That's how deep my devotion to the free market goes!)
Anyway, Uncle Sam offered Melchior the dole and she accepted it as Fantine in Les Miz accepted a life of prostitution: "The Internet consensus is that unemployment isn’t welfare," she chokes, "but it felt like it to me." So different from this hell I'm living/So different now from what it seemed!
Melchior found out that the lousy benefits weren't enough to live on -- and yet insists they were "a disincentive to work." How? Because when she got freelance assignments, UI would cut back on her benefits! In other words, if someone else paid her money, the government gave her less money, instead of letting her accept fixed benefits and keep whatever she earned on top of it. Here I sympathize with Melchior and look forward to her next essay, which I expect will endorse Martin Luther King's national minimum income plan. It's only fair!
Plus, humiliating as that was, Melchior was also forced to observe the law when she claimed benefits, which she counts a further humiliation -- "figuring all this out felt shamefully like working the system," much like when employers force her to take sexual harassment seminars and it makes her feel like a rapist.
As you might imagine, it all worked out for Melchior: "In the end, I took the risk and did as much freelance writing as I could manage. It paid off — in fact, it led to a job" -- Yay wingnut welfare! But the experience scarred her, and she wants to spare other broke people the same ordeal: "A safety net can fast become a trap," she tells the folks to whom she would deny money for food and shelter, "and I wonder how many unemployed people who could be somehow engaged in the economy are waiting things out, taking their benefits and avoiding the risk of effort while they wait for something to open up."
Let her wonder; such are the mysteries of the human heart. What I wonder is why Melchior didn't show the courage of her convictions, refuse to take the benefits, and proudly starve in the street.
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