According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national rate of unemployment dropped to 8.5 percent in December, the lowest it's been since 2009. Of course that rate is still entirely too high, but it definitely shows economic progress is being made.
Republican candidates are certainly not excited to see their bid for election become harder, but are still willing to completely blame President Obama for the abysmal economy.
Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, is wholeheartedly spreading the blame around. Instead of the typical "liberals are burning down this country," he's turned on the unemployed.
In an interview with WFLA, a Florida Fox News Radio station, he said that the nation shouldn't be giving the 13 million unemployed "99 weeks to do nothing," referring to the extended unemployment benefits that a bill passed in 2009 gives out.
This has been a common theme before. When the original bill, called the American Recovery and Reinvestment act, slowly dragged through Congress, conservative commentators had a field day ripping apart American workers down on their luck.
Take for instance Rush Limbaugh's comments that extending unemployment benefits would only "incentivize people not to look for work." In the twisted neo-con landscape, the obvious solution to businesses not hiring and creating new jobs is to punish the unemployed.
So what is Gingrich's grand plan to get those lazy unemployed people to pull themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps?
Make it a requirement for everyone receiving benefits to sign up for some sort of training program run by a business and, according to Gingrich, at least those bums will be showing a little effort to get hired.
Wonderful idea there, Newt, and how do you expect people to pay for that? Are we going to force companies to provide that service for free? Forcing companies to do things for the state certainly doesn't fall under the Republican mantra of "small government."
So would the Government pay for this program? Well that doesn't exactly fit under the guise of "small government" spending.
The obvious solution that Gingrich is advocating is that a parent who was laid off and struggling to stay above water without drowning in debt should spend their money on job training rather than put food on the table. Quite an interesting solution, when you consider those same companies aren't hiring anyway.
Time and time again conservatives look for ways to make villains out of the poor. They think people on welfare need to get drug tests, while the banks that get bailed out and anyone else with government subsidies don't have to do anything. Now, anyone laid off from a job is a lazy bum.
Completely ignored are the hardworking, blue collar Americans who have worked in their field for years and would rather be working than waiting and hoping for jobs to show up.
Thrown out are the hard-working college grads that work their asses off to find work in one of the worst economic climates since the great depression.
Mr. Gingrich, it may have been a very long time since you've had to experience a struggle to have food on your table or money to pay the electricity bill, but Americans work harder than anyone else. That includes our unemployed.
