and you hit the nail all the way into the board too. Thanks.

This is America, folks. If you are unemployed for more than a week here in the USA, you are willfully unemployed.

Let's talk real world experience! When I lost a job in the construction industry (as a skilled tradesman), and I knew that my last two paychecks were never going to make an appearance in my bank account, I found another job immediately. I worked at Red Robin bussing tables for a couple of months. I was woefully underemployed. I was shorted about $2600 that I'll never see, and I had maxed my credit card (only $500), had my phone service cut off (involuntarily), two checking accounts go so far into the red that they were closed and sent to collections, and I had to move back in with my parents.

BUT I had found something that provided me with a little bit. I talked to my bill collectors, told them my situation, and worked things out with them. I worked my tail off at Red Robin, but applied at a lot of different places until I finally got a stable job (at Micron - and yeah - I'm still there).

The point is that people may be temporarily UNDERemployed, but unemployment is almost always either voluntary or a consequence of poor choices. Granted there are people who have certain disabilities, etc, to whom I grant an exception to that last statement. People are too prideful to be underemployed these days. So rather than work for $50/day, they will do nothing for $80 and drain other people of their hard earned money.

Besides, unemployment and welfare are legal plunder schemes to redistribute wealth. Aside from being unconstitutional (which unfortunately means very little these days anyway), they are just stupid ways of trying to promote "general welfare." General welfare is best promoted when all people who can labor will do so at a fair market value for their labor.

I could belabor this point much further and talk about the intricacies of how minimum wage laws promote unemployment, and protective tariffs are damaging to industry, but I digress. I recommend heading to your local "Library!" and checking out Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. It's a fantastic book!