Washington Examiner ^ | 01/03/2014 | BY DAVID FREDDOSO
Posted on 1/3/2014 8:43:55 PM by SeekAndFind
People who find themselves unemployed today are no more lazy or unworthy than you or I. They've just fallen on hard times — as a lot of people have in recent years, and as more are sure to in the years to come. They don't want to go on unemployment benefits, which in most cases pay much less than nearly any job.
But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to maintain a permanent unemployment benefits regime that goes on for a year or even two.
As the new year began, Congress allowed its extended unemployment benefit program to expire. Depending on what state you're in, tens of thousands of people will probably lose benefits immediately, and many more will see them run out in the next few months. Depending on the state, benefits for the newly unemployed will go back to roughly 26 weeks.
Legislators may revisit the issue, and if they do, they should first look at what happened in North Carolina, a state that cut off extended benefits already and found that it doesn't end the world — it just hastens the inevitable.
In July, North Carolina became the first state to end extended unemployment benefits altogether. As John Hood notes in the Carolina Journal, the number of employed in the state jumped by 39,000 between July 1 and Nov. 30, after standing still for the entire first half of the year. The state's unemployment rate had taken more than two years to come down by 1.5 points to where it was in June (8.8 percent). Between July 1 and Nov. 30, it declined by roughly that amount (to 7.4 percent). During that same period, about 26 percent fewer workers were dropping out of the workforce each month than had been previously.
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