“I think it’s real­ly unfair that it would be so easy to turn the sequester around and allow us to do some­thing for the long term to take care of this issue. But no, the Repub­li­cans like the pain. They like the pain.”  — Sen­ate Major­i­ty Leader Har­ry Reid, April 24, 2013

Har­ry Reid (D‑NV) has late­ly embraced the pain of sequester. On Thurs­day, Reid advanced a pro­pos­al to off­set the cost of extend­ing “emer­gency” unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits with auto­mat­ic cuts in med­ical spend­ing for the elder­ly and disabled.

Reid’s evolv­ing posi­tion on seques­tra­tion is a mat­ter of polit­i­cal expe­di­en­cy. Last year, he was hop­ing that the across-the-board cuts required by bipar­ti­san leg­is­la­tion that he sup­port­ed would result in “pain” for which he could upbraid Repub­li­cans. At one point, he sug­gest­ed that seques­tra­tion was to blame for an explo­sion at a Neva­da mil­i­tary facil­i­ty that killed 7 Marines.

The anti-seques­tra­tion cam­paign fiz­zled despite the enthu­si­as­tic efforts of Reid and Pres­i­dent Oba­ma. This year, the plan is to blame Repub­li­cans for allow­ing “emer­gency” unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits to expire. When Reid teed up a clo­ture vote on the unem­ploy­ment bill as the Senate’s first order of busi­ness in 2014, he was hop­ing for a con­fronta­tion. Repub­li­cans didn’t oblige him. Six of them vot­ed with Democ­rats last week to pro­vide the nec­es­sary 60 votes for the Sen­ate to begin debate on extend­ing job­less benefits.

Reid detests debate. He finds it irk­some that Sen­a­tors insist on their right to offer their own ideas as amend­ments to bills that his aides write. One can’t, after all, improve upon per­fec­tion. So on Tues­day he resort­ed to the famil­iar pro­ce­dure of pre­vent­ing any amend­ments to the bill, effec­tive­ly halt­ing progress on the mea­sure. His osten­sive pur­pose was to give his col­league and name­sake Jack Reed (D‑RI) the oppor­tu­ni­ty to work out an agree­ment with a group of Repub­li­cans led by Rob Port­man (R‑OH) on a bipar­ti­san plan.

By Thurs­day evening, his patience worn thin by the inac­tiv­i­ty he’d forced, Reid (Har­ry, not Jack) announced that he could wait no longer. He advanced a new pro­pos­al to extend emer­gency unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits until after the mid-term elec­tions. The mea­sure would require the gov­ern­ment to bor­row $18.8 bil­lion over the next 10 months, then pay it back – 10 years from now – with auto­mat­ic cuts to Medicare. You know, the kinds of cuts that cause the pain that Repub­li­cans like so much.

Reid has set a vote on cut­ting off debate on his lat­est brain­storm (which, in typ­i­cal Reid fash­ion, has nev­er been debat­ed) for tomor­row after­noon. On Fri­day, how­ev­er, he report­ed­ly had a change of heart. His spokesman told reporters that Reid was “absolute­ly will­ing for the Sen­ate to con­sid­er a rea­son­able num­ber of rel­e­vant amend­ments from Republicans.”

If true, that would be rather a sig­nif­i­cant change. So far in 2014, the Sen­ate has offi­cial­ly been in ses­sion for five days. In that brief peri­od, Reid has blocked amend­ments to the unem­ploy­ment bill, delayed a clo­ture vote to allow for bipar­ti­san nego­ti­a­tions, declared that the time for nego­ti­a­tion had passed and offered a new pro­pos­al, moved to pre­vent amend­ment and debate on that pro­pos­al, and then, through an aide, pro­nounced that he might per­mit amend­ment and debate on it after all. One can only won­der what tomor­row will bring.

If this lat­est Reid posi­tion holds, its prac­ti­cal result would be to give bipar­ti­san nego­tia­tors anoth­er shot at devis­ing a more durable solu­tion to the unem­ploy­ment program’s per­pet­u­al emer­gency. Con­gress and the Pres­i­dent have kept that pro­gram in an uncer­tain state for near­ly 6 years. The basic unem­ploy­ment com­pen­sa­tion pro­gram pro­vides ben­e­fits for 26 weeks. In June 2008, Pres­i­dent Bush signed leg­is­la­tion that cre­at­ed a tem­po­rary Emer­gency Unem­ploy­ment Com­pen­sa­tion pro­gram that pro­vid­ed ben­e­fits for a longer peri­od of time. Con­gress has vot­ed to extend that tem­po­rary pro­gram 11 times over the past 5–1/2 years. With the most recent exten­sion, unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits could last any­where from 40–73 weeks, depend­ing on the state’s job­less rate. The emer­gency pro­gram expired on Decem­ber 28. At that point, the max­i­mum length of ben­e­fits revert­ed to 26 weeks, with an esti­mat­ed 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple falling off the rolls.

Some Repub­li­cans and vir­tu­al­ly all Democ­rats want to retroac­tive­ly restore these ben­e­fits for at least a few more months. The argu­ment is over whether and how to pay back the new debt that gov­ern­ment would incur.  There also is the ques­tion of whether the emer­gency pro­gram should con­tin­ue to lurch from tem­po­rary exten­sion to tem­po­rary exten­sion. The bipar­ti­san group of Sen­a­tors wants to keep the emer­gency pro­gram run­ning through April and hopes to use that time craft more last­ing changes to the unem­ploy­ment program.

Such a restruc­tur­ing seems jus­ti­fied by the mad­den­ing­ly com­plex trends in unem­ploy­ment: on the one hand, the rate last month dropped to 6.7 per­cent, a healthy decline from the 7.9 per­cent rate when 2013 began; on the oth­er hand, rough­ly 2 mil­lion few­er Amer­i­cans are work­ing today than in Novem­ber 2007 and the per­cent­age of work­ing-aged peo­ple who either have jobs or are seek­ing them has plumbed a 36-year low.

In the chart below (click on it to enlarge), the blue line indi­cates the offi­cial unem­ploy­ment rate, while the red line shows what the unem­ploy­ment rate would be if the per­cent­age of peo­ple in the work­force had remained the same as it was in Decem­ber 2008.

The chart presents two ways of ana­lyz­ing the unem­ploy­ment rate over the last 6 Decem­bers (2008–2013). If you focus on the blue line, you might say that the cri­sis is sub­sid­ing. The offi­cial unem­ploy­ment rate has been steadi­ly drop­ping since 2009 and is now low­er than it was in Decem­ber 2008. If that told the entire sto­ry, you might argue that “emer­gency” unem­ploy­ment ben­e­fits no longer are needed.

The red line presents a very dif­fer­ent pic­ture. It shows what the unem­ploy­ment rate would be if the pro­por­tion of work­ing-aged peo­ple who either had a job or were look­ing for one had remained unchanged. That rate has dropped to 62.8 per­cent in Decem­ber 2013 from 65.8 per­cent in Decem­ber 2008. If that 65.8 per­cent rate had held steady, the job­less rate would have eclipsed 11 per­cent in Decem­ber 2009 and would stand at 10.9 per­cent in Decem­ber 2013, as shown by the red line. Unlike the trend in the offi­cial unem­ploy­ment rate, it has essen­tial­ly remained flat in the 4–1/2 years since the reces­sion ended.

Despite var­i­ous forms of fed­er­al “stim­u­lus” – his­tor­i­cal­ly high deficits, inter­est rates held at 0 per­cent for more than five years, and an unprece­dent­ed and ongo­ing pro­gram of asset pur­chas­es by the Fed that has bloat­ed its bal­ance sheet to $4 tril­lion – the red line shows that job­less­ness is stuck at a dis­turbing­ly high level.

The dis­par­i­ty depict­ed in the chart is ren­dered more per­plex­ing by the fact that old­er work­ers, the ones you’d think most like­ly to drop out of the work­force, are actu­al­ly hang­ing in. Labor force par­tic­i­pa­tion among peo­ple 55 and old­er, as the chart below shows, is high­er than it’s been in half a cen­tu­ry. It is falling for every oth­er age group.

These trends mys­ti­fy econ­o­mists of all per­sua­sions and nei­ther polit­i­cal par­ty has offered a ter­ri­bly sat­is­fy­ing expla­na­tion of what has gone wrong, much less what to do about it.

Lack­ing con­struc­tive ideas, politi­cians do what politi­cians do best: advance polit­i­cal­ly-dri­ven pro­pos­als to extend job­less ben­e­fits and raise the min­i­mum wage in the hope of cast­ing their oppo­si­tion as heart­less scoundrels. It doesn’t solve the prob­lem, but it does cause the oppos­ing par­ty some pain.

And Har­ry Reid real­ly likes the pain.