Rand Paul Gets Unemployment Facts Exactly Wrong

Rand Paul has a problem with secondary sources.  First it was the plagiarism scandal. Now it comes from citing economist Rand Ghayad when Paul was arguing that extending unemployment benefits increases unemployment. Fortunately Ghayad was paying attention:

But Paul misreads my work to try to back up his argument. He says my paper, which shows that companies don’t want to hire people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, proves his point about long-term benefits (though he confuses it with another paper I authored with William Dickens). How does he figure this? Well, Paul thinks that “extending long-term benefits will only hurt the chances of the unemployed in the job market,” because longer benefits will make them choose to stay unemployed longer—at which point firms won’t hire them. But just because companies discriminate against the long-term unemployed doesn’t mean long-term benefits are to blame. Paul might know that if he read beyond the first line of my paper’s abstract.

I know these academic papers are boring (I write them too!)  But if you want to cite them, you should probably suck it up and read past the first sentence.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.