Thinking some more about John Boehner’s resurrection of the notion that we’re suffering weak job growth because people are living the good life on government benefits, and don’t want to work. It has long seemed to me that the issue of unemployment benefits is where the debate over economic policy in a depression reaches its purest essence. If you’r on the right, you believe — you more or less have to believe — that unemployment benefits hurt job creation, because you’re “paying people not to work.” To admit that depression conditions are different, that the economy is suffering from an overall lack of demand and that putting money into the pockets of people likely to spend it would increase employment, would mean admitting that the free market sometimes fails badly. And of course disdain for the unemployed helps a lot if you want to oppose any kind of aid for the unfortunate.

But there’s something remarkable about seeing these claims made now — because even if you believed that expanded unemployment benefits were somehow a cause rather than an effect of the economic crisis, those expanded benefits are long gone. Here’s unemployment benefits as a percentage of GDP:

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They’re back down to their level at the height of the “Bush boom”.

And here, from Josh Bivens, is the recipiency rate — the percentage of the unemployed receiving any benefits at all:

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It’s at a record low, and as Bivens says, the pullback in benefits is one main reason economic expansion isn’t reducing poverty.

So basically the right is railing against the bums on welfare not only when there aren’t any bums, but when there isn’t any welfare.