It's a bad Omen when you start a blog and and can't source the material that you are commening on but here goes: A few days back I read a comment in favor of extensions of unemployment benifits. The logic was that if people realise that thier unemployment benifits are about to end their "consumer confidence" may drop and they will reduce their spending.

To that I say "Like duhh!!!". When I was younger I people around me would lose their jobs from time to time. Some would decide this was a good time to take that vacation. If they got in a jam later and wanted to "borrow" some money my sympathy level was greatly reduced.

Losing a job is a lot like the electricity going out. It usually come back on soon but you assume the worst and strategize carefully before opening the refrigerator or freezer doors. I have since gotten a backup generator (actually two). I have never had to actually use them in a home power outage but they are a lot like "money in the bank". A crude analogy but when you are unemplyed you should immediately try to reduce spending as much as possible.