Teri Silver: Commen-"Teri"

Congressional respresentatives ... our elected officials ... are going back and forth as to whether the nation needs extended unemployment benefits to help individuals through this longterm economic crisis.  According to the Washington Post, some congressional leaders think people who receive jobless benefits ... half of what they were making before losing their jobs ... means these folks won't even look for jobs, period.

Yeah, OK, Sure. Hey, let's just coast off "the system."

Everybody is "studying" unemployment ... why the numbers are so high, how it affects the would-be worker, if said-worker is actually looking for work, whether work exists in a field that said-worker can actually perform, and so on and so on. Never mind if age discrimination plays a part in any of this but ... here's the bottom line.

You can quote all the "statistics" you want. People are out of work. When people are out of work, they cannot feed themselves, pay mortgages, pay taxes ... No work or supplemental income means no outgo. Period. And in the meantime, we suffer. Contrary to what our paid representatives think, many of us do not want to sit on our collective ass, we want to work for wages that pay the bills. We want to eliminate the stress, the debt and we want to feel useful. We want to be respected. We want to feed our families and prepare for the future. So before Congress tells us we're trying to scam the system by not working at jobs we're not qualified for anyway, let them walk a few miles in our shoes.

 I can go on here but the people who really need to listen ... do not.