Five years ago, California's genius Bay Area Democrat - Nancy Pelosi - declared that government unemployment checks generate job growth. Yes, really. "Let me say about unemployment insurance," she told reporters, "this is one of the biggest stimuluses (sic) to our economy. Economists will tell you, this money is spent quickly. It injects demand into the economy and is job creating."
She babbled on: "It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name, because, again, it is money that is needed for families to survive, and it is spent. So it has a double benefit. It helps those who've lost their jobs, but it also is a job creator."
The nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research concludes that the recent job gains Pelosi and the Democrats are now crowing about may be due to the very policy they fought so hard against: ending extended unemployment benefits.
"We find that a 1 percent drop in benefit duration leads to a statistically significant increase of employment by 0.0161 log points," the NBER economists reported. In practical terms, it means that "1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut." Take note: "Almost 1 million of these jobs were filled by workers from out of the labor force who would not have participated in the labor market had benefit extensions been reauthorized."
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