The trouble with unemployment is that the minute you wake up in the morning you're on the job.

 - Comedian Slappy White

Is everything old new again?  Is the current rhetoric coming from the Republican presidential candidates about unemployment and comments about Americans aversion to work something new?  From my perspective I don’t seem to recall hearing that kind of sentiment in presidential campaigns past.

People like Herman Cain - "Don't blame Wall Street, don't blame the big banks, if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. It is not someone's fault if they succeeded, it is someone's fault if they failed,".

Or Erick Erickson, the blogger for the right-wing Red State Americans Don't Want to Work in talking about extending unemployment benefits  he refered to them as the Ones who are able to collect unemployment longer instead of looking for work.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was asked what he would do about unemployment insurance, particularly in regard to those unemployed workers who had exhausted their 99 weeks of benefits.  The former speaker suggested that benefits were being abused by people who were more interested in living off the government dime than in finding actual work. "It is fundamentally wrong to give people money for 99 weeks for doing nothing,".

Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for senator of Nevada in the 2010 election. said during a speech, "We did those things growing up that Americans don't do. We cleaned bathrooms and made beds. Swept floors. Did laundry." But now, according to Angle, Americans won't do those jobs, and unemployment benefits, specifically Harry Reid's vote to extend them, are to blame. 

Getting back to Gingrich who recently said that child labor laws are "truly stupid:  told an Iowa audience that children in poor neighborhoods have "no habits of working" nor getting paid for their endeavors "unless it's illegal.  "And so I'm prepared if the NAACP invites me, I'll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps," Gingrich said earlier today in Plymouth, N.H.

Most studies of unemployment insurance have showed that lethargy is not a side effect of providing help to the unemployed. The money that is being distributed simply doesn't cover the salary lost from not having a job. The more cynical minded would argue that Gingrich's condemnation of welfare insurance resembles the type of class warfare that Republicans are often deriding... only in reverse.

Unemployment levels in the last two years have spiked as high as 10% and currently hover around at 8%.  In 2001the unemployment rate was at  a low of 4%.  It seemed when the jobs were available people worked but in this current environment there are currently 4.3 applicants per job .

Reality is a little different than the picture being painted "Workers receiving the last 20 weeks of benefits – Extended Benefits – have no choice about what job they’ll take.  The law says their benefits are cut off if they refuse even a minimum wage job, so they aren’ doing what they have been accused of by  holding out for what “really high-paying jobs.”

It seems the message is that the unemployed are responsible for their fate, and that the mass of Americans are just looking for handouts from the “hardworking engines of society”??

Like I said in the beginning - I don’t remember that kind of sentiment being said by Politicians twenty years ago.  Do you?

Looking back in time  I will quote an article by Tim Dickinson

“The nation is still recovering from a crushing recession that sent unemployment hovering above nine percent for two straight years. The president, mindful of soaring deficits, is pushing bold action to shore up the nation's balance sheet. Cloaking himself in the language of class warfare, he calls on a hostile Congress to end wasteful tax breaks for the rich. "We're going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share," he thunders to a crowd in Georgia. Such tax loopholes, he adds, "sometimes made it possible for millionaires to pay nothing, while a bus driver was paying 10 percent of his salary – and that's crazy”

Preacherlike, the president draws the crowd into a call-and-response. "Do you think the millionaire ought to pay more in taxes than the bus driver," he demands, "or less?"

The crowd, sounding every bit like the protesters from Occupy Wall Street, roars back: "MORE!"

The year was 1985. The president was Ronald Wilson Reagan.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-the-gop-became-the-party-of-the-rich-20111109#ixzz1kQgow3sA