Just want to point out that if you're finding yourself unemployed and wanting to bootstrap your own business, your state might have something called the Self Employment Assistance program - it's federally funded but managed by the states.<p>After meeting with business counselors and ensuring that your idea is sound, you file your business plan with the state (they don't share it) and can start receiving your normal unemployment benefits.<p>Here's the awesome part: they're giving you the benefits to work on your business full time. No need to do job searching. It's six months of runway. Pretty awesome.
The article contains a single anecdote about someone not looking for work due to unemployment benefits. How does it follow from this that such benefits are extending the recession?<p>Is the author saying that unemployment benefits keep consumer spending down? If the person's take home pay is about the same, as the article suggests, this should not be an issue.<p>Maybe the author is suggesting that unemployment benefits create a shortage of labor by discouraging workforce participation? This would be an even harder argument to make given the continued layoffs across all sectors of the economy.
I've seen first hand that this is true.<p>My former room mate / business partner (see: iStoleYourStartup) was laid off of his iPhone game dev job and started collecting unemployment (while illegally trying to bootstrap iZenStudent).<p>They extended his unemployment benefits, so he <i>continued</i> to not look for a job and <i>continued</i> not tell the Texas Workforce Commission that he was trying to run his own business.<p>I had half a mind to turn him in because my tax dollars was funding his "start up."