If you listen to certain types, the unemployed are lazy people with no education and no skills who just want to sit around their house and collect their benefits tax free.  The unemployed, you'll hear, don't really want a job.

The truth, of course, is nothing like their lies.  As Jack Nicholson's character said in A Few Good Men, "you can't handle the truth!"

First, the maximum unemployment benefit in California is $450 a week.  That works out to around $23K a year.  In order to collect that, you need to have earned around $48K a year on the job you lost through no fault of your own.  How many people do you know who would take a 50 percent paycut just so they could sit around and collect unemployment?  How many people do you know that would trade the lifestyle a $48K a year job could buy for one that a $23K a year check would buy?

In my brief stint on unemployment, I went from a $16 an hour plus commission job to around $11.50 a hour.  Think I wanted to keep scraping by on that income?

Oh, and by the way, that income is taxable.

Second, the lie is that those who are unemployed are lazy.  Uh huh.  Is that why they held a job and met the minimum compensation requirements for unemployment?

In my case, for their lies to be true, you'd have to believe that someone who started delivering papers when he was a 13 year old kid and who held part time jobs through high school and college was lazy.  And that someone who consistently exceeded quotas didn't work hard.

And remember, you need to have been fired due to reasons that weren't your fault.  If you didn't do the job because you were lazy, guess what?  It would be your fault, and you wouldn't be able to collect unemployment.

Then there's the no skills and education lie.  Okay, maybe I don't have the skills of a doctor or a rocket scientist.  Sales doesn't require geniuses.  What it does require is people who know how to read others, what questions to ask to determine their needs, and how to get information out of people that they may not want to disclose.  It also requires a certain amount of tact, because you can't just blurt out, dude, you can't afford what you want to buy as much as it may seem obvious to you.

There's a certain skill set that you develop if you do it well.  And believe me, lots of people don't do it well.

And while my job doesn't require a college degree, it's always something that's stated in the preferences.  I've got two of them.

So it's clear that anyone who says that only the unskilled and uneducated are unemployed is lying.

The one thing the liars are correct on is that many people on unemployment won't take the first job that comes their way.  If all I can get is an eight buck an hour job at Starbucks, why would I take that over collecting $11 an hour in unemployment?  Remember, the insurance that I'm collecting was paid for through years of hard work.  And if I'm going to take a pay cut, I'm going to try to minimize it.

But is this really a bad thing?  There's a reason the rules of unemployment state that you must take the first suitable job you are offered.  If an engineer gets laid off because they ship his job to India, should he take a job flipping burgers?  Is that really a good use of his training and skills? 

Or should he take unemployment, and find a job that best uses his talents?  What's better for the country and the economy in the long run?  An engineer flipping burgers or one who collects unemployment until he can find another job that uses his engineering skills?

Truth is, many of the unemployed are hard working, smart, and skilled workers.  They lost their job through no fault of their own, and they're looking for another one.  To pan them as lazy, unskilled, uneducated leeches that want to just suck off the government teat is a lie.

Talk about kicking someone when he's down.  Only the lowest of the low would do this.