Here is what Senator Brown said about the extension of unemployment benefits that the Cleveland Plain Dealer incorrectly analyzes as mostly true:
Understand, this is unemployment insurance. It’s not welfare, as a lot of my Republican colleagues like to suggest it is. You pay into it when you’re working. You get help when you’re not.
Not even close.
Employees do not pay for the unemployment “insurance” — which is really a tax, because it is not voluntary — except in the most rarified economic sense. That is, theoretically, employer could pay higher wages if the employer did not have to pay the unemployment compensation tax. Of course, when the unemployment folks raise the employer’s rates, there is no automatic decrease in wages to pay for it. Furthermore, the progressives who got the tax enacted certainly never sold it to the unions and working public as a tax that they would have to pay.
No. Mr. Brown’s statement that workers pay the tax is neither legally correct nor honest.
It is welfare. It is a transfer payment that goes from the pockets of employers through the government agency then into the pocket of the unemployed. There is no insurance system in any real sense. In real insurance, the insurance company takes in premiums, pays out benefits, and makes money by investing the float. Government “insurance” does not work that way. The only resemblance to insurance is that the taxes (they call premiums) will vary based upon the employer’s experience rating.
The efforts to legislatively extend benefits provesthat it is welfare and not insurance. If it were insurance, a rational insurer would know that it has not collected enough premiums to pay for greater the benefits.
No. It is a tax and welfare system, pure and simple. Worse, it is welfare system that rewards failure and is fraught with fraud.
Anyone who knows many recipients of unemployment benefit knows that they are not lazy, they will work, but only for “under the table” cash, so their unemployment checks will not be affected.
Senator “S**t-for-Brains” Brown would not know about such things. Or he is such a demagogue he does not care.
He has got to go in 2012.