“We could have avoided this nationwide facepalm if unemployment benefits were designed to rise and fall with the health of the economy, in the first place. ‘Automatic stabilizers prevent you from cutting off things too soon,’ George Washington University professor Jay Shambaugh, who co-edited Recession Ready, and served on Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me. ‘The idea that the unemployment rate is higher than at any point in the Great Recession and we’re about to pull support from the economy—that’s just ridiculous…'”