Last Call For Rand Paul Meets Annie Hall

Remember this classic scene from Woody Allen's Annie Hall?





As Steve Benen points out, Rand Paul got the Marshall McLuhan treatment on his idiotic insistence that cutting federal unemployment benefits is a good idea.

This week, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had a McLuhan Moment of his own. The Republican senator continues to argue that extending federal unemployment benefits to jobless Americans would be bad for those already struggling, and cited economist Rand Ghayad to bolster his claim. 

Ghayad didn’t literally say, “You know nothing of my work,” but he came awfully close.

Oh it gets worse.  Ghayad's response in part:

So why does [the senator] want to end unemployment benefits for people who have been out of work for 6 months or longer? Well, Paul cites my work on long-term unemployment as a justification – which surprised me, because it implies **the opposite** of what he says it does. 

Now, we clearly have a long-term unemployment problem. The question is why. Paul says it’s all about incentives. He thinks extending unemployment benefits does a “disservice” to the unemployed by encouraging them to stay unemployed for too long. And as a “big-hearted” member of a party that cares about the jobless, he wants to protect them from making such mistakes – by cutting their benefits, of course. 

But Paul misreads my work to try to back up his argument.

Ouch.

"You know nothing of my work," indeed.

PS, here in Kentucky the unemployment rate is 8.2% for November 2013, significantly higher than the national average.  Perhaps Rand Paul might want to take his constituents into account and do his job rather than trying to lie his way into being a presidential "contender" in 2016 at our expense.