Unemployment

You know, I try to see things from different perspectives.  As I've aged, I like to think I've become just a little bit wiser and more willing to accept a different point of view.

That being said, when I read the Huffington Post, I realize that to see things from their authors' point-of-view, I would have to stick my head far up my ass.

Unemployment.  I've been there, and it's not fun.  I count myself lucky that I was effectively out of work for only five months, my job essentially terminated by Mr. Hope and Change.  Still glad I didn't vote for him.

There's a story about the Republican challenger to Harry Reid characterized those collecting unemployment as lazy.

To be fair, in Minnesota, you qualify for unemployment only as long as show that you're actively seeking a job.  So that part of the article is accurate.

Where the author and the chorus of group-thinkers get it wrong is that all of these jobs have disappeared.

The article cites there are 15 million unemployed people, and that only one-third of them are collecting unemployment insurance.  The group-think chorus spouts the "conventional wisdom" that the jobs are gone.

Wait a minute.  I believe there are at least 10 million jobs available for American citizens.  Know where I'm going with this?  Enforce our immigration laws.  Herd the illegal immigrants back across the border and tell the governments of Mexico, the nations of Central America, and various little shit-holes around this world to solve their economic problems themselves.  And if they've got too many people, tell them the solution is not to smuggle them into our country, but to do 2 things:

• Eliminate corruption and foster a business-friendly environment
• Educate their populations to not breed like wild rabbits

And those citizens' original jobs?  They'd come back if the government would get out of the way and let us recover from this recession.  Instead, this litany of stimulus spending has been nothing but digging us into a deeper hole.  We were promised unemployment wouldn't rise above 8%.  Yeah, shame on anybody that bought that line of crap.  Reagan once famously said that you cannot spend your way into prosperity.

And I realize it's anecdotal evidence, but I recall attending a 2008 election party with an unemployed software engineer.  She'd been unemployed for 3 years at that time.  I couldn't comprehend that.  I still can't.  Three years?  She ain't trying hard enough.

During my unpaid "vacation", a former colleague observed that, amongst us engineers, any of us could get a job in a couple of weeks if we looked outside Minnesota.  To many, that's outside a personal comfort zone.  I have some advice for the habitual whiners who can't find work where they live:  Move.  I did.