Austan Goolsbee Quotes

They keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job, because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does.

Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders.

I worked at the Illinois unemployment office. I got $55 a week and the unemployed got $45. And they only had to come in once a week.

Immediate relief for the unemployed was the first essential

In some states unemployed workers have to call overseas to find out about their benefits.

Understand, this is unemployment insurance. It's not welfare, as a lot of my Republican colleagues like to suggest it is. You pay into it when you're working. You get help when you're not.

There should be unemployment insurance for fictional people.

The more generous the benefit, the easier you make it to stay on unemployment insurance, and the less incentive there is for people to actually go out and do what it takes to get a job.

I think it's a little insulting, a bit insulting to American workers when Rand Paul says that unemployment insurance is a disservice.

If you can work and if you're offered a job and you don't take it, you cannot continue to claim benefits. It will be extremely tough.

Extending federal unemployment insurance is vital for millions of Americans laid off through no fault of their own, and it serves as an important economic stimulus.

I've heard the argument that unemployment benefits somehow act as a disincentive to the long-term unemployed when it comes to looking for work, but the opposite is true. Unemployment Insurance serves as a powerful incentive for people to keep searching for jobs, rather than drop out of the labor force altogether.

I still have my unemployment books and I remember when I worked for the sanitation department and the post office.

Anyone with a job wants to hear about how to keep it or get a better one, not what a politician has to offer when workers find themselves with a pink slip.

We require Canadians who are collecting EI benefits to prove they are looking for work. It's only fair that we require employers looking to benefit from the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to prove they really need it.

Americans don't believe that we have a surplus of jobs. They believe that we have a surplus of job seekers, and they are competing for these jobs.

In normal times, laid-off workers are unemployed an average of eight weeks.

I have a friend who's collecting unemployment insurance. This guy has never worked so hard in his life as he has to keep this thing going. He's down there every week, waiting on the lines and getting interviewed and making up all these lies about looking for jobs. If they had any idea of the effort and energy that he is expending to avoid work, I'm sure they'd give him a raise.

Well, all across the country, this is kind of sad, unemployment offices are swamped with people waiting to file for unemployment insurance. It's gotten so bad that the offices are overwhelmed and can't function. I got an idea. Why don't you hire more people? They're right there in line. Speed this whole thing up!

I'm very good at being out of work.

You know, it cuts both ways... no one wants to lose a job, but everybody wants to work.

Unemployed people are spoiled

The unemployed want to work. They are not chiselers.

Everybody wants to help folks out. But we've got a system where you can stay on unemployment for an awfully long time. And I think we need to create a system of decreasing benefits over time to encourage you to get a job.

There was a time where I chose my jobs based on what jobs were available to me, so I would choose 100 percent of them.