‘Economy faces a jolt as benefit checks run out’
12th July 2011
An excellent example of the sort of drivel that passes for reporting these days. The New York Times appears to be specializing in that sort of thing.
An extraordinary amount of personal income is coming directly from the government.
More accurately, an extraordinary amount of personal income is being re-distributed by the government. The government only has money when it take it from a taxpayer, or borrows it from a bondholder.
Close to $2 of every $10 that went into Americans’ wallets last year were payments like jobless benefits, food stamps, Social Security and disability, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. In states hit hard by the downturn, like Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Ohio, residents derived even more of their income from the government.
Of course, this ‘analysis’ doesn’t mention the fact that amounts that the government put into some Americans’ wallets were first taken from other Americans’ wallets. You’d think that the government magically found this money under a rock somewhere.
By the end of this year, however, many of those dollars are going to disappear, with the expiration of extended benefits intended to help people cope with the lingering effects of the recession. Moody’s Analytics estimates $37 billion will be drained from the nation’s pocketbooks this year.
Well, no, they won’t ‘disappear’ — they just won’t be spent by the government, but rather by the citizens who earned them, instead. (Don’t you just love the phrase ‘drained from the nation’s pocketbooks’? Drained to … where, exactly? And ‘drained’ implies that it was in the ‘nation’s pocketbooks’ in the first place, which if course it wasn’t; the Crustian assumption is that if the government fails to give you a dollar, it therefore has taken that dollar from you.)
People actually get paid money to write this stuff.