“Do Unemployment Extensions Keep the Jobless at Home?”
Ha! Is every single adult who read one or more “Harry Potter” books a secret pedophile? (Answer: yes.)
Every few weeks I’ll come across another article like this, in which the author timidly posits the question of whether some people might possibly perhaps prefer sleeping until noon and cashing free checks to rising at dawn, packing ass-to-crotch onto the subway, and spending all day filing TPS reports down at the regional Pet Rock distribution center while breathing in your cubicle neighbors’ gaseous bodily emissions. These articles always end on the same note: “but of course this couldn’t be the case, since you could make marginally more money at a job, and nobody in their right mind would take less money just to have a higher quality of life. After all, this is America.” Which is sort of a good point.
Nevertheless, the fact is that any rational thinking human being is going to prefer free checks to indentured servitude, and for God’s sakes of course if you extend unemployment I’m going to take the money and, well, not run so much as sort of lay sideways on this here Laz-E-Boy I dragged in off the curb, and continue smoking pot out of this inexpertly gouged apple bong. And the fact is, there’s no reason I should feel at all guilty about that. After all, the checks are funded by taxes, and I paid taxes when I worked, and the politicians who chastise “unemployment milkers” are really only doing so at the urging of their campaign contributors, who as long as unemployment is continually extended, find it especially difficult to find people desperate enough to take a sub-living wage and no benefits to do horrible repetitive soulmurdering “work” down at, for example, their regional Pet Rock distribution centers. Where profits were in fact down ten percent last quarter because fifteen percent of the population was unemployed, and once the fog of perpetual sleep deprivation and mind numbing commutes cleared, they all realized that buying more Pet Rocks would not, in fact, make them feel better. See how it all fits together, folks? (Takes bow.)
