Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Phillips Rep. Tim Wirgau Thinks Unemployed People Just Don't Want to Work
Posted by Betsy Phillips on Tue, May 24, 2011 at 7:42 AM
I hope y'all didn't miss this little gem on Friday. In a story about extending the unemployment benefits for thousands of our most-screwed Tennesseans, Glen "Let Then Eat Cake" Casada and Tim Wirgau argued against the measure.
Andy Sher, in the Chattanooga Times Free Press, has the relevant quotes.
First from Casada:
But Rep. Glen Casada, R-College Grove, the former House Republican Caucus chairman, spoke against acting, saying that although most of the money comes from the federal government, it affects all taxpayers.“We cannot continue to borrow money to give to people who don’t have a job after 79 weeks,” Casada told the chamber. “I would contend the answer to that is it’s up to individuals to help their family and their friends and neighbors who don’t have a job.”
Apparently Casada doesn't know that individuals who have family, friends and neighbors are taxpayers, but Casada is ... well, Casada. Hard to even get mad at him anymore, really.
But Tim Wirgau is a more interesting case. He says, "We got people who can't find jobs, but we got more people who don't look for jobs because we keep handing them money." Got that? There are, according to Wirgau, people who can't find jobs — that's one group — but there's a larger group of people who don't even bother to look for jobs because they're lolling around counting that sweet unemployment money.
In Wirgau's own district in March, there were 3,420 people out of work. If some of them can't find jobs but "more" of them aren't even bothering to look, that means there are, at the least, 1,711 people in District 75 who just aren't trying hard enough, by Wirgau's own metric. There are jobs; those jackasses just aren't working them.
Here's my question: If what Wirgau says is true — there are all those people who could find jobs, if they'd just look, which would mean there's at least 1,711 open positions in his district, why isn't he setting up some kind of program to tell the people who can't find jobs about them?
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