On Unemployment

On Unemployment

I have heard a lot of discussion in the media about unemployment, the extension thereof and persons receiving Unemployment Insurance benefits. Many of those speaking seem to have made certain fundamental errors in their description of the program. I, of course, have chosen to go 'Ad Fontes', or 'To The Sources' to obtain the information to refute these misstatements.

First, let us look at what the benefits are. They are Unemployment Insurance. Like medical insurance, homeowners insurance, auto insurance, social security insurance, renters insurance, or business insurance. That means a premium is paid, and the beneficiary HAS EARNED these payments. It is not charity. It is not welfare. It is not a dole. It is a benefit the individual worker has earned by working. They are for the purpose of assisting an individual beneficiary to recover from a casualty that was no fault of their own.

From the Florida state unemployment benefit rights handbook available here.

The Unemployment Compensation Program –
What it is. What it is not.
The Unemployment Compensation Program:
• Provides temporary, partial wage replacement benefits to qualified
workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own;
• Supports economic stability for employers who depend on consumer
spending;
• Is funded solely by employers who pay federal and state unemployment compensation taxes; and
• Is provided at no cost to the workers who receive the benefits.

The Unemployment Compensation Program is not:
• Social Security;
• An automatic entitlement;
• A loan;
• Based on need;
• Intended to fully replace your previous income; or
• Funded by any deductions from wages you have earned.

Income Taxes
Unemployment compensation benefits are fully taxable, if you are required to file a tax return.
Contact the Internal Revenue Service toll-free at 1-800-829-1040 if you have questions on your tax
liability.
You have two options concerning income taxes. You may request that income tax:
Option 1: NOT be withheld, or
Option 2: be withheld.
If you choose to withhold income tax, we will withhold 10 percent of your Weekly Benefit Amount.

I will now address these statements in detail.

The Unemployment Compensation Program

Compensation is the key word here. Compensation is only given to make up for a perceived wrong. While an employer may be (in terms of business ethics - an oxymoron) right in terminating an individual due to a reduction in profit, it is a wrong in terms of social and spiritual ethics. You have impoverished this person. This person is no longer capable of supporting themselves in our society. They now earn no money. As an aside, an employee at my former employer at the time the lay offs were made sent a message to our CEO that rather than performing a 15% layoff of personell at the bottom, he (our CEO) cut everyones pay from the top down by 10% and cut the hours of hourly employees by an additional 10% until the economic crisis ended. Our CEO's response was 'I don't want to do that'. Not 'I can't', not 'that won't work', but 'I won't'. So to ensure that he and the other individuals at the top would continue to receive their six figure salaries, we at the bottom were discarded like so many used condoms.

• Provides temporary, partial wage replacement benefits to qualified workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own

Temporary means the support is not for the lifetime of the individual, unlike for example a Senatorial or Congressional pension. Check the office of congressional budget and finance webpage for more details on this. Partial means that the individual (in Florida) receives 1/2 of their average weekly gross pay up to $275.00, an amount equal to $6.88 an hour for a 40 hour week. Wage replacement means that individuals receiving these benefits were working prior to their job loss. Unemployed through no fault of their own means they were not fired due to being late, uncooperative, lazy, or any other legitimate reason for termination.

• Supports economic stability for employers who depend on consumer spending

Contrary to statements made by many conservative pundits, Unemployment Insurance benefits are not a drain on the economy, they allow economic activity to continue without the massive disruptions that were the result of the Great Depression.

• Is funded solely by employers who pay federal and state unemployment compensation taxes

Look at that word in italics up there (the italics are mine). Solely. This means, in my case, that my employers for the last 29 years have been paying these premiums. The employers of the 83- 90% of Americans who are still working are continuing to pay these taxes. If 9 out of 10 Americans are still working, WHERE THE HELL IS THE GODS DAMNED MONEY !?.

• Is provided at no cost to the workers who receive the benefits.

At no cost to the worker means we were not required to pay into this. We are already considered to be paying into this by generating profit for our employers.

The Unemployment Compensation Program is not:

• Social Security

Which is another form of insurance for workers who have grown too old to continue their former employment.

• An automatic entitlement

Once again, it is something that is earned, and is only paid when the worker is not at fault in their loss of employment.

• A loan

It does not require repayment, because it has been earned.

• Based on need

Thus, as it is not need based, it is not welfare, unlike the BILLIONS of dollars passed out by our congress to the major financial institutions that got us in this mess to begin with.

• Intended to fully replace your previous income;

And it does not. Not even close. $6.88 an hour, remember?

• Funded by any deductions from wages you have earned.

Such as, oh I don't know, taxes?

Income Taxes

Unemployment compensation benefits are fully taxable, if you are required to file a tax return.

This refers to the fact that the federal government, in its infinite mercy, has decided that those making less than $850 a year with less than $300 of that coming from invstments are exempt from federal withholding. This, for a forty hour work week amounts to $.41 per hour. Personally, I cannot think of anyone in this country making forty-one cents an hour, unless it is an illegal alien.

Contact the Internal Revenue Service toll-free at 1-800-829-1040 if you have questions on your tax liability.
You have two options concerning income taxes. You may request that income tax:
Option 1: NOT be withheld, or
Option 2: be withheld.
If you choose to withhold income tax, we will withhold 10 percent of your Weekly Benefit Amount.

Here is another good point. Another typical pundit quote is 'The American taxpayer is tired of paying for Unemployment Benefits'. The only 'American taxpayer' who should be paying for unemployment benefits is Corporate America. Remember? The guys who got us into this mess by bad investments, massive outsourcing, layoffs, plant closures, lying to investors, corporate raiding, hiring of illegal aliens, union busting, golden parachutes, and the purchase of products from countries using child labor, slave labor, and having pay rates of a few dollars (if that) a day.

Also, this means that the people receiving Unemployment Insurance benefits are taxpayers.

I will freely discuss any issues or percieved inaccuracies in this statement, however anonymous comments will be ignored.

SV

aka Joseph F. Wilke

On Faith

What is faith? When we speak of religion or spirituality in any form we frequently refer to our concepts associated with them as 'our faith'. Most people, if given time, would define faith as 'things we think are accurate reflections of reality, in the absence of empirical proof'. The word 'faith' comes from the Latin fides, to trust. This meaning has been carried forward to the modern era, in that our faith describes the group of tenets and principles we have trust in. On a very basic level faith describes those things that we believe to be so basic to the nature of our world view that we feel no need to verify them by experiment. An example of this is 'I have faith that, if I were to place my hand on my workbench and use my other hand to smack it with my 3 pound sledgehammer, I would be in a great deal of pain". How do I know this without having done it? I know this through the experience of others, observed and related to me, from similar experience of my own, and through the rational process of combining these experiences into a general principle 'It hurts when heavy things hit the body'. By logical extension, I can include large rocks, wooden beams, elephants and automobile engines in the category of ' heavy things' without requiring any or all of the above to fall upon or be thrown at me.

'But', you may say, 'you have empiric evidence of the result of the above experiment, as a result of related experience. You may not have done it with that hammer on that workbench, but you had similar experience with other related objects'. I will grant the truth of this statement. However, let us consider an individual who either through mastery of biofeedback techniques, use of chemichal or natural anesthetics, nerve degeneration or disability has no sensation in their hand. Let us further assume that this individual has been in this state every time they encounter the events described above. This individual would have to accept, on faith, that their body would, under normal circumstances, experience the sensation called 'pain' by others when these events occured. This may seem to be a rather absurd chain of reasoning but, when brought into other realms of experience, it can be seen to be a valid example.

Consider the individual born with red/green color blindness. They do not see trees, roses, grass, etc., in the same fashion as those of us who have what is called normal vision. They have to accept, on faith, that these colors exist as described to them by others. This phenomenon is more common than you might believe. There exist individuals in the population who have a greater or lesser than average ability to perceive color, sound, taste, touch, and scent. I myself, in spite of being a smoker, can often tell when I am close to water or when a rainstorm is approaching by the smell. There are many people who will tell you that water has no taste or smell, so how do I do this? I cannot extend my perceptions directly to others, so as a result I must describe to them, in language, the sensations accompanying my perception. They, as a result of past experience with my veracity, will then grab their umbrellas or head out to the pool depending on how truthful they believe me to be.

There is a phenomenon in medical research called the 'placebo effect'. This occurs during double-blind testing of drugs and treatments when an individual receiving said object believes that their condition will improve and it does, even when they have received an inert substitute for the treatment. They got better without any chemichal or medical intervention beyond 'this will make you better. This occurs in daily life more often than people realize, when an individual performs some major or minor feat of strength or skill, and when asked they respond 'I did not think about whether I could do it or not, I just went in and did it'.

Even the most hardened empirical sceintists will have to admit some level of faith. Science, as a body of knowlege about the principles and functioning of the universe, is based on several fundamental tenets. These are (in no particular order):
1) The universe is knowable.
2) The universe is subject to rules.
3) These rules can be discovered through a process of observation, reason, and experiment.
I would like to look at each of these tenets in a little more detail beginning with tenet #1.

The Universe is Knowable

Science assumes as a first fundamental tenet that the human mind is capable of learning how the universe works. That we, as humans, are reasonable beings in a reasonable universe that we percieve in an accurate fashion. This is why paeleontoligists and geologists disagree with the creation stories of various religions, because if they are true , then the various bones, fossils, and layers of rock must have been created ex nihilo (from nothing), in situ (where they are), as a part of the single greatest act of forgery ever commited on humankind.


The Universe is Subject to Rules

What is meant by this is that there are a limited number of ways in which a particular event can occur. New species do not appear out of nowhere, gold does not suddenly turn into peanut butter, and rocks fall when dropped. Every event is the direct result of a series of other events, some known some unknown, and events can be linked in a consistent series that, given a sufficeint number of observed events, the results of which can be predicted before they occur. Scientists are no less prone to dogma than any other group. Einstien's basic argument against quantum physics was that the behavior of particles appeared to be random, 'God does not play at dice with the universe'. We now have a better model of particle behavior than was available at that time, due to advances in our tools and mathematics. Probability does still seem to play a large part in particle behavior, however.


These Rules Can Be Discovered Through a Process of Observation, Reason, and Experiment

This tenet assumes that our observations are an accurate reflection of what we observe. When we see a tree, it is not a dog, rock, ham sandwich, or any thing other than a tree. It assumes that our reason is neutral and unbiased, in good working order, and capable of comprehending what we observe. It also assumes that our tools are capable of accurately measuring the extent of or accurately enhancing our perception of a praticular event. One of the arguments against Galileos observation of the moons of Jupiter was that what appeared to be moons were actually just flaws in his lens. Another example of this is a mirage, of which I have seen a few in florida on a hot summer day.

Many scientific theories that are commonly accepted today were quite controversial in their time. Continental drift, for example, was only accepted in the last century. The royal society in Britain argued in the 1700s that meteorites did not exist. The examples are myriad and diverse.

So let us get back to faith. Specifically faith in the existence of divinity. I will not argue whether this existence is singular (monotheist), paired (dualist), multiple (polytheist), or universal (pantheist). I will however look at a few arguments against the existence of any or all of these.

One argument is that if this (these) being(s) exist(s), we would have empiric evidence of such existence. My agument against this statement is that the planets Uranus and Neptune, and the ice dwarfs Pluto, Charon, etc (at least 8 at this point and it is highly probable there are many more) did not appear out of nowhere as soon as we had the tools to perceive their existence. They were always there, we just did not have the tools to percieve them. (for always read 'a really fecking long time'). There are other examples of this including atoms, electrons, viruses, germs, and the site of the historical Troy. Absence of proof is not proof of absence. Or, to put it another way, it is the bear you don't see that gets you. We have huge amounts of personal testimony from individuals who vary in veracity from untrustworty (Rev Jim Bakker) to extremely trustworthy (Gandi). Some of these individuals have no reason to deceive the public. Does a hermit living in the mountains of Greece, India. or Colorado really care what the public thinks?

Other arguments are based on the nature of proof. Eyewitness testimony is sufficeint to convict an individual of murder in most (if not all) countries. However these same eyewitnesses will be told they are delusional if they attempt to testify as to the existence of divinity. The opinion of a licensced professional is sufficient for people to risk millions of dollars on an investment, but not for them to spend a few hours a week pursuing things of the spirit. I personally know an avowed atheist who rejects the idea of any divinity, but spends his free time photographing and filming ghosts. He has even stated that the reason he believes the way he does is that his wife channeled the spirit of his dead mother, and she said there is no god. First of all, what mysterious transformation occurs in the process of dying that makes an individual less likely to lie? Secondly, if a spirit is not bound by time and space, how difficult would it be for this spirit to observe any time or space and get information with which to deceive people as to its identity?

My reasons for belief are simple. First, I have directly experienced the numinous. I have felt the touch of the divine, both waking and sleeping. Secondly, I am of the opinion that it is the height of arrogance for us as a species to say we know everything there is to know about our species, the universe, and the relationship of the two. There is something there. What it is, how it functions, and what view it may (or may not- thank you Vroomfondel) have of humanity as a whole, or any particular individual or group in that whole is an argument I leave to the theologians (demarcation, mate). I have seen proof enough to convince me, and that is all any reasonable individual can expect.

SV.