Graduates Freeze Themselves Out of Job Market

The Onion ran a great piece this week about unemployment, "New College Graduates to Be Cryogenically Frozen Until Job Market Improves." The article reports on a new measure passed by the federal government to freeze recent college graduates until there is a job for them in the struggling economy. The theory is that since two-thirds of college grads won't be able to find jobs, we should freeze them right after graduation, capturing them in their most enthusiastic and hopeful state, before the depression of unemployment or a "position at a mall sunglasses kiosk" sets in.

The main thrust of the article is that the government is not doing enough to help employ people, even highly educated college graduates, and that the government's solution to big problems is always to push it away and leave for a later time. Instead of making tough decisions about the economy, the government simply wants to freeze everyone out of relevant existence.

However, the government is not the only target here. The Onion criticizes college graduates who studied something useless, in effect giving them some of the blame as well for being unemployed:

"Let's say there's some sort of environmental crisis," Schumer said. "Well, we could selectively thaw students who majored in ecology or climatology and provide them with jobs. The same logic would apply if, say, 300 years from now a real-world application for people with philosophy degrees somehow arose."

The Onion also takes a shot at providers of student loans, who will apparently continue to charge interest even while the graduates are frozen. The point here seems to be that perhaps graduates should not have to pay their loans back until they are actually employed, and they certainly should not become even more expensive to pay back.

The key here is still the government, though. It would seem to me that providing tax breaks for hiring companies or even direct government employment would be more practical than spending billions of dollars freezing people.