In an interview this Wednesday, Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle heightened her criticisms of unemployment insurance, insisting that the benefits program to help the jobless ended up benefiting nobody.
Sitting down with conservative radio talk show host Heidi Harris, Angle once again addressed a topic that brought her a bit of political heat -- including a hard-hitting ad from her opponent Harry Reid-- not too long ago.
"People don't want to be unemployed," she explained. "They want to have real, full-time, permanent jobs with a future. That's what they want, and we need to create that climate in Washington, D.C. that encourages businesses to create those full-time, permanent jobs with a future, and all [Rep.] Shelley Berkeley and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid want to do is put a band-aid on this by extending unemployment, which really doesn't benefit anyone. What happens is of course that your skills stagnate. You become demoralized yourself, you know, feeling that I can't ever get a job, and these are not the solutions to the problem. We have real solutions, but they won't look at the real solutions."
(Emphasis ours)
This is a fresh twist in Angle's relatively robust campaign against unemployment insurance. Prior to her appearance with Harris, the Tea Party favorite had argued that such benefits made the jobless "spoiled" in their dependency on the government. On other occasions she's stressed that unemployment insurance should be cut so as to compel people to go look for work.
Until this week, it doesn't appear that she's ever argued that UI doesn't "benefit anyone." -- a rather bold proclamation that even the most doctrinaire of Republicans probably wouldn't make. It's pretty easy, after all, to find people who benefit from unemployment insurance. They're called the unemployed.