The Wall St. Journal’s Op-Ed page often provides a refreshing glimpse at what members of the ruling class and their cronies really think about today’s affairs and the people who are most affected by them. The newest installment in their repugnant, “let em’ eat cake” series of economic opinion pieces is an unapologetic drive-by shooting of extended unemployment benefits. Robert Barro, Harvard economics professor and senior fellow at the neoconservative Hoover institution, takes liberties with meaningless, out-of-context figures and attempts to prove that unemployment can be magically wished away by simply dropping receipts from their benefits.

I want to focus here on another dimension of the Obama administration’s policies: the expansion of unemployment-insurance eligibility to as much as 99 weeks from the standard 26 weeks.

The unemployment-insurance program involves a balance between compassion—providing for persons temporarily without work—and efficiency. The loss in efficiency results partly because the program subsidizes unemployment, causing insufficient job-search, job-acceptance and levels of employment.

Mr. Barro makes a lot of assumptions. I seriously doubt he spoke to any actual unemployed people prior to writing this hit piece. Even more doubtful is whether he knows any unemployed people–ya know, the kind who don’t have massive trust funds and other investments to sit on for the rest of their lives.

It’s quite clear the professor’s sympathies lie with captains of industry and the economists that spin all sorts of nonsensical dribble as an apology to plutocratic excess in a manner akin to the temple high priests of the sanguine old days of early civilization. The professor, being hermetically sealed from the real world through his tenured, academic ivory tower and country club social network, clearly lacks the ability (or desire) to see anything in a greater macroeconomic perspective. Either that or he is consciously manipulating data, having no qualms about being downright dishonest in order to preach his deeply-ingrained biases.

To begin with a historical perspective, in the 1982 recession the peak unemployment rate of 10.8% in November-December 1982 corresponded to a mean duration of unemployment of 17.6 weeks and a share of long-term unemployment (those unemployed more than 26 weeks) of 20.4%. Long-term unemployment peaked later, in July 1983, when the unemployment rate had fallen to 9.4%. At that point, the mean duration of unemployment reached 21.2 weeks and the share of long-term unemployment was 24.5%. These numbers are the highest observed in the post-World War II period until recently. Thus, we can think of previous recessions (including those in 2001, 1990-91 and before 1982) as featuring a mean duration of unemployment of less than 21 weeks and a share of long-term unemployment of less than 25%.

These numbers provide a stark contrast with joblessness today. The peak unemployment rate of 10.1% in October 2009 corresponded to a mean duration of unemployment of 27.2 weeks and a share of long-term unemployment of 36%. The duration of unemployment peaked (thus far) at 35.2 weeks in June 2010, when the share of long-term unemployment in the total reached a remarkable 46.2%. These numbers are way above the ceilings of 21 weeks and 25% share applicable to previous post-World War II recessions. The dramatic expansion of unemployment-insurance eligibility to 99 weeks is almost surely the culprit.

2010′s economy absolutely cannot be compared to that of 1983. Apples and oranges. No fuzzy fruit basket of math formulas can make that pig fly. Back then America still manufactured a lot of stuff. The gargantuan oil fields of the North Sea and the Persian Gulf were just beginning to pump at full blast. China and India were still pretty dirt poor for the most part. Today they are cranking out mass quantities of goods and services that we used to. They people in each of those countries now consumes a far greater share of resources than they did 30 years ago. America, along with the other developed nations, now has to complete on a global scale for a dwindling inventory of precious energy resources.

Our current economic depression due to both the aforementioned energy crisis and the implosion of our credit system that has functioned like the cross between a Ponzi Scheme and a Vegas casino. The finance sector, which produces nothing of real value for our society, had come to dominate an American economy that forgot how to produce much of anything of long-lasting, physical worth. Any one with half a brain should have been able to guess that an economy that doesn’t go far beyond big box retail, suburban McMansions, cheeseburgers and infotainment, would not stand the test of time. Our “livin’ large” lifestyles were largely enjoyed on borrowed time.

What’s been religiously-celebrated as “economic growth” over the past many decades is a complete farce. The only thing that has kept our economy afloat since the late 70s is the hyper-consumption of shoddy goods enabled by an orgy of hallucinated, speculative paper wealth we all know as credit. “Growth” simply means an increasing rate of the Earth’s finite supply of resources being processed into finished goods and all the services that accessories the sale and marketing of such goods. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of basic math should be able to deduce that infinite growth can not take place within a medium of finite resources. In debt-based monetary system, infinite growth is the only thing that can keep the whole charade from collapsing.

Our new date with mass unemployment comes as a result of pretty much everything I mentioned above along with these key factors:

• The steady advance of mechanization and automation allows our technology to produce more with less, (given a reliable and cost-effective supply of energy inputs to run the machines) therefore an ever-declining need for human labor hours to produce X amount of goods and services.
• Outsourcing of work that doesn’t require specialized skills and education. This globalization of labor is due to the nature of a global economy defined by cheap transport costs and instant communication. As long as energy remains cheap, the old barriers will remain shattered. Once global oil starts becoming harder to extract, therefore more expensive for everyone, then we can start talking about countries like America re-localizing production.
• Capital deployment that is to a great degree no longer loyal to any specific national concern (maybe this should be a part of the above item)….i.e. international capital calling the shots
• A collective entitlement complex in which a majority of the people of the richest countries demand a high material standard of living, therefore their unwillingness to take on the most undesirable of occupations. The people will likely riot in the streets and demand that heads will roll before they will even consider voluntarily becoming serfs.
• The loss of purchasing power across the board because of the first three items along with the disappearance of easy credit that enabled the fake “boom economy” in the first place.

The ugly truth is that the good ol’ days of gluttonous consumption for Americans is in the past. Will be collectively accept a lower material standard of living. I think there will be a lot of self-entitled brats who will not be able to come to terms with this new reality. Whom they will turn to in these times of desperation is pretty scary to ponder. We’re already seeing this in action and it will only get worse. The Plutocrats and their sympathizers will continue to publish hit pieces like this on regular folk until the people finally wake (one can dream) up and realize who is really behind this humiliating economic collapse of epic proportions.

With approximately 26 million American workers on the unemployment lines or unable to find a full-time job, millions more having lost their homes, and regular people faced with relentless wage-cutting while Wall Street reels in record profits, things are bound to only get uglier over the next year. I hope the unlikely happens and that Professor Barro, that devout pusher of voodoo pseudo-science known as economics, finds himself without a job. Perhaps then he will get some well-needed perspective he’s likely been deprived of his entire life.