Buy Or Don’t Buy

In the interest of full-disclosure, I was recently laid off as an editor/blogger at a start-up. On one very surreal Friday the boss-fellow called a meeting and told the majority of the staff (yours truly included) that due to the economic apocalypse, our time at the company was over.

And after a resume-revamping weekend (where it occurred to me I no longer needed to let prospective employers know I was a camp counselor in the summer of 2001), I went ahead and applied for unemployment insurance through the New York State Department of Labor’s not-really user friendly website. Two weeks later, the government is depositing a (modest) weekly sum into my Chase checking account.

I have heard numerous complaints about unemployment insurance coming straight from the mouths of the unemployed, all of which boil down to three primary grievances:

a. “It’s not enough money to sustain my lifestyle.”
b. “Getting unemployment insurance is a bureaucratic nightmare.”
And my personal favorite…..
c. “I don’t deserve this money.”

Spare me the self-righteous and whiny mumbo-jumbo. Sure, the unemployed are only getting paid about 50% of what they technically were making beforehand, but the workload undergoes a 100% decrease. From a purely mathematical standpoint, and time-is-money perspective, there is nothing worth complaining about. And it’s not as if the unemployed are collecting taxpayer money that could/should be used to cure cancer; in fact, the system is set up so employers pay that tax just so the unemployed can have some sort of safety net. Yeah quasi-socialism!

But wanna-be scholarly arguments aside, at the end of the day all the unemployed benefactors are getting is payment for leisure time. Pretend to read Voltaire, illegally download Rosetta Stone and pick up German, guest post for BuyorDontBuy.com, and, of course, apply for new jobs without that air of desperation or anxiety.

And people say there is nothing good about the recession. Chuckle.