Dear Congress- The Unemployed Don't Want Unemployment Insurance. They Want Jobs!

[DemocratSinceBirth]

I am fifty years old. I have collected one week of unemployment insurance my entire life. For the past fifteen or so years I was a sole proprietor of my own publishing company. I would publish relocation/visitors guides for the leisure and real estate industries. I would sell the ads myself and use the revenue to pay the printer, the designer, the editor, et cetera. What was left over I kept. I wasn't making a fortune but it was a business model that worked. That model died when the real estate and leisure industries went into a tailspin. I have spent the better part of three years trying to reinvent myself and my business.

My girlfriend is a senior accountant. After months and months and months of looking for work she found a senior accountant position that required us to move from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale in June. Although she was making decent money we could never put together enough money to put a security deposit down which sometimes equals two or three months rent. We would use priceline to bid on hotels, moving every four or five days to get the best deal. I have lived in twenty four different places since June. It's a good thing we never put down a deposit as her company was purchased by another company in Texas that is using existing staff to fulfill their needs. They let my girlfriend and her colleagues go without any kind of severance. We would have never got our deposit back.

She sends out resumes everyday, communicates with old contacts, posts her resume on craigslist.

It's a jungle out there...


on edit- I should mention that if you can't provide jobs for the jobless who are ready and able to work it is incumbent upon you to provide sustenance until such time they can find work. Even the so called rogue regimes you criticize try to do that.

[MadHound]

1. Hear, hear!

But until these mythical jobs start appearing, people need unemployment insurance just to keep body and soul together.

[madokie]

2. The way this old okie sees it is the people who control the jobs

are the rich republicons and until we shape up there won't be any new jobs created. When I type "shape up" I mean when we start praying at the collective corporate feet. Something I won't do