Morning Must-Read: Rand Ghayad: No, Rand Paul, There’s No Reason to Cut Unemployment Benefits

Rand Ghayad: No, Rand Paul, There’s No Reason to Cut Unemployment Benefits:

Rand Paul says he cares about the unemployed…. So why does he want to end unemployment benefits for people who have been out of work for 6 months or longer? Well, Paul cites my work on long-term unemployment as a justification—–which surprised me, because it implies the opposite of what he says it does…. Paul says… extending unemployment benefits does a “disservice” to the unemployed by encouraging them to stay unemployed for too long. And as a “big-hearted” member of a party that cares about the jobless, he wants to protect them… by cutting their benefits, of course. But Paul misreads my work to try to back up his argument. He says my paper, which shows that companies don’t want to hire people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, proves his point…. But just because companies discriminate against the long-term unemployed doesn’t mean long-term benefits are to blame. Paul might know that if he read beyond the first line of my paper’s abstract.