For much of the year, congressional Democrats have tried to convince their Republican counterparts to pass an extension of long-term unemployment benefits, arguing that failure to do only exacerbates the pain of the long-term unemployed. A 2012 paper dug up Tuesday by the conservative American Enterprise Institute's Andrew C. Quinn makes that case more convincingly than ever.

The paper, by Stanford sociology professor Cristobal Young, estimated the effects unemployment has on happiness, in some cases when the newly unemployed received UI benefits and others when they did not. The results are clear: Unemployment benefits make unemployment easier.

This graph shows that unemployment benefits alleviate nearly a quarter of the loss in well-being that accompanies loss of a job.

But that's not how Quinn characterized it.

“Unemployment benefits merely take a little bit of the edge off the happiness downdraft from being laid off,” he writes. “To be sure, the financial help cuts back on some stress at the margins. But just as clearly, involuntary idleness brings a massive psychological cost that mere money can hardly touch.”