Something else I came across in my efforts to figure out the anti-unemployment angle. Pretty brutal:

First taking a big bite out of Barry O:

The good news is we have avoided another Great Depression. But it seems ill-advised for Barack Obama to stand up on a Friday morning in early July and say that the economy is "headed in the right direction" (even if, as he said, "we are not headed there fast enough") and to highlight "the sixth straight month of job growth in the private sector." The employment-to-population ratio has been flat since November. Over the past six months--since the downturn ended--the U.S. economy has not been recovering from its near-depression, and not been putting a greater and greater portion of its potential labor force to work. Rather, it has been bumping along the bottom. There is a big difference between the economy getting "better" and the economy "no longer getting worse rapidly."

So far, it seems the Obama administration has, at every stage, made honest forecasts within the bounds of consensus opinion. But it has been making policies appropriate to the 80th percentile outcome--to the situation in which we have quite good luck. It should have been making policies appropriate to the 20th percentile outcome—in effect, buying insurance against the possibility of bad luck. And we have had bad luck.

And then:

But Congress is balking. Republican legislators from states with double-digit unemployment have put party above country. Blue Dog Democrats, who think that they can marginally improve their chance of gaining more terms in office if they publicly worry about the deficit to the exclusion of all else, have put self above country and party. And, significantly, the Obama Administration has never offered a grand bargain for tax increases and entitlement caps in the future in return for more spending now to restore full employment.

Just a general ideological issue turned into a political calculation? I guess I really never put unemployment in the category of Keynesian thinking--probably because, at least in my life time, unemployment benefits were a secondary artifact of the economy never a tool. True enough, it is a Keynes thing, but it's almost like I've never seen it evoked as it is now. Privilege of being under 30, I guess.

All things considered, not that unbelievable.