Also, last week we posted a call on Open Salon looking for stories about how your experiences contradicted common myths about unemployment. The responses so far range from an Atlanta PR director’s unexpected plunge into joblessness during her golden years to a former auto plant supervisor’s nightmarish firing to the musings of a Fresno woman contemplating the nickels she needs to find to buy another burrito. These clever and brave essays provide a compelling challenge to the misunderstandings that continue to reinforce the painful stigma of unemployment.

My benefits counselor, a tall, stocky, healthfully heavyset Indian man, speaks like a machine gun.  ”Fifty-five,” he says brusquely as he waves his arm at a numbered booth in a long row of numbered booths.  I’m still non-caffeinated so it takes me a moment to realize what “55″ means, then I take my seat across from him.  It looks (and feels) like I’m in prison.

The caseworker, whom I’ll call Chakim, is vigorous and businesslike.  ”ID?  Social Security card?”

I quickly hand him everything: my driver’s license, threadbare Social Security card with my awkward childhood signature, and my passport complete with its January 2011 stamp from India (I hope he notices).

He asks me, rat-a-tat-tat: “Unemployed?  How much per month?  Self-employed?  Pay by cash or personal check?”

“I am self-employed,” I tell him, “payment is very inconsistent.  Maybe $750 or $800 a month.”

“You have pay stubs?  Pay in cash or personal check?”

I show him a few scattered check receipts from a folder.  Four hundred and fifty dollars here, $100 there, another for $200, another for $500.  This is the writer’s life today.

“And how much is your rent?  Other bills?”

I tally them up: $770 for rent, $40 for cellphone, $25 for utilities.  That’s over $800 right there.

Chakim looks at me quizzically.  ”So how are you surviving?  Your rent is higher than your income?”

Savings, I tell him.  It’s true: For the past few years, as a semi-accomplished, mid-career journalist and writer, I’ve been scuffling in the always difficult, but now beastly hard choppy waters of freelancing, supplementing my obscenely low (often under $15,000) income with some money my grandmother left me years ago.  Combined, in the city of San Francisco, I live on something around $20,000.  Every year, even as I work my butt off scrambling for assignments and clients, that little nest egg shrivels frightfully smaller. Now it’s almost gone, and though I’ve had some good little runs here and there with work, I’m hurtling precipitously toward poverty.

I’m hardly alone in my marginally privileged plight: As Huffington Post reported in June 2010, food critic Ed Murrieta went from restaurant-hopping with an expense account to living off a $200-a-month food stamp allotment. According to the USDA, 46.3 million Americans depend on food stamps to survive — a historic high, due to recession and population growth.

The soaring food stamp rolls, though quite predictable in the midst of a deep recession, have inspired wealthy Republican candidates for president (is there any other kind?) to brand Barack Obama “the food stamp president,” even though, according to USA Today, the rolls rose more sharply under President George W. Bush.

Roughly one in six Americans (one in five children) does not have reliable access to food. According to USA Today, citing census data, nearly half the country is poor or low-income.  Even as unemployment eases modestly in some places, the vast underbelly of America is, economically and nutritionally, underfed.

I call myself frayed white collar — part of the privileged poor.  I have a college degree, a career and an array of middle-class, working-class and more economically privileged friends; together we are a fairly good representation of the 97 percent, or maybe the 95 percent.  And most of us are hard-pressed; even my teacher friends, making about $60,000 a year, are perpetually flat-lined economically, eking across each month’s finish line thanks to credit cards.

Back in the benefits office, Chakim clicks away at his mouse with big, thick fingers, rifles through his accordion folder, thrusting papers in front of me: “Sign.” I look up at him questioningly.  ”Sign,” he says again.  ”I’m trying to help you.  Just sign.”  So I do.

“Getting unemployment now?  Been on food stamps before?”

“No, no unemployment.  This is my first time on food stamps,” I tell him. ”Except for when I was a kid.”

Behind Chakim, against the opposite wall, a prank coffee mug, sliced in half, reads: “You asked for half a cup of coffee.”  Here in America’s embattled public benefits land, that sure feels like a metaphor to me.  Still, just to warm things up, I tell Chakim I like his coffee mug.

Within minutes, Chakim pulls out a Department of Human Services form titled “Food stamps intake follow-up,” jotting down my name and case number, and, benevolently, checks off the box where it says I will be certified for food stamps for 12 months.  I’ll be “required to complete Form QR 7, Quarterly Eligibility Report, once every three (3) months.”

I feel a rush of saliva in my mouth, as if I’m about to taste food.  I’m not remotely going hungry, my pantry and fridge are at least modestly attended by basic solid good foods (bags of greens and turnips and broccoli from farmers’ market, organic chicken in the freezer).

But as Chakim readies my approval documents, I taste a happy relief, imagining myself with my shiny new electronic benefits card, stocking up each month without moving toward destitute quite so quickly.

As I mentioned to Chakim, perhaps to curry sympathy, I grew up on food stamps.  In the 1980s, while Ronald Reagan was raising the frightful specter of “welfare queens driving Cadillacs,” my single mother and I relied on food stamps for years, even when she worked at a health food store in Boston.  We muddled through with her poverty wages, food stamp booklets, and, sometimes, slightly bruised but totally edible produce the store couldn’t sell.

I don’t recall ever feeling ashamed about being poor.  To me, those booklets of food coupons were like Monopoly play money, and they kept us going.  But now I’m 44, single, nobody to feed other than myself, and as Chakim signs the final papers, my sense of victory quickly feels like defeat.  How have I “sunk” to this unkind station where, if I don’t get help or significantly boost my income, I could soon be ass out on the unforgiving streets?

As I leave the cinderblock edifice, passing people huddled around the entrance smoking cigarette butts, a wave of shame and sadness comes over me.

How have I fallen back to where I was when I was a food stamp, Head Start kid (getting, yes, free lunches)?  America is supposed to be the engine of progress, and each of us is assigned the “promise” and, effectively, the duty, of keeping up that steady march.  Even though I never bought the American narrative of progress and opportunity, I somehow feel like a bumbling screw-up for not holding up my end of the bargain.

With my “Golden State Advantage” benefits card in hand, I move quickly from shame to guilt. Why?  After all, I pay taxes, even if not very much on my poverty-level income (effectively about the same rate Mitt Romney pays on his thus far untold millions a year in investment income). Oh yes, of course, this is bootstraps America, land of free capitalistic opportunity.

Public assistance has always carried the puritanical stink of stigma and guilt.  As Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward explained in their classic book ”Regulating the Poor,” guilt and shame have long been intentional features of public aid — along with various forms of coerced labor and invasive monitoring — dating back to England’s poor laws of the 16th century, through to today’s much demonized welfare capitalism in America, where Republicans goad and bait our nation’s first black chief executive as “the food stamp president.”

Along with personal guilt, there is my broader political concern: that by adding to the food stamp rolls, I’m diminishing Obama’s chances of reelection (not that I’m a fan, but the Republicans have embraced full-fledged barbarism, threatening to destroy what little is left of the safety net).

But as a low-income progressive writer (talk about redundancies!) I’m committed to a couple of things: getting myself fed, and getting out the word that being on food stamps — or expanding them as president — is about as far from a crime as one can get.  Despite my personal response to being on the dole, the fact is, these benefits keep people alive. They keep people eating, and they keep others working, by essentially subsidizing the market for food retail.

Perhaps most important, food stamps are not the problem, nor are they the solution.  They are a basic Band-Aid that barely keeps people afloat, while America’s corporations and the exceedingly rich make off like bandits, vacuuming their profits away from the public treasury.  One might say that’s “another story,” but in fact rich people like Mitt Romney (and Newt Gingrich, for that matter) evading taxes while blaming the poor for living off virtually nothing — that’s the real story we should be talking about.

As I walk through my gray shame and guilt in the cold overcast morning, I treat myself to a panic cigarette on my way to Whole Foods, where my purchases amount to coffee and a carrot and an apple ($1.88, more than half the daily individual food stamp allotment) to augment my homemade tofu veggie stir-fry lunch.  My electronic benefits transfer card won’t be activated until tomorrow. Then I’ll feel rich indeed.

No matter what your political persuasion, those numbers hurt. The distressing plight of the long-term unemployed has been well-documented. The longer you are out of a job, the less likely you are to find new employment. And if you do find a new job, it will probably pay less and offer worse benefits. Extended unemployment is bad for marriages, physical and mental health, and plain old self-respect.

With all that in mind, we face an astonishing political reality: The Republican presidential nomination battle has moved into Florida, a state still suffering the pain of an unemployment rate over 10 percent, and we’re hearing more from Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney about each other’s personal failings than we are about what they are going to do to fight the scourge of unemployment.

Oh sure, there’s no end of talk about how President Obama’s policies are responsible for everything that is wrong with the American economy. We’re also hearing a lot about the (bogus) theory that extending unemployment insurance benefits makes Americans too fat and lazy to get off the couch and look for a job. And there’s the occasional rhetorical gesture: At the end of his concession speech in South Carolina, Mitt Romney pledged that “I will get America back to work, and I’ll make sure that we remain the shining city on the hill.”

It’s certainly possible that the necessity for mano-a-mano combat between Romney and Gingrich has forced the two candidates to shelve their critique of Obama’s handling of the economy for the time being while they busy themselves going for each other’s throat. But there’s another reason why we aren’t hearing much about the unemployment crisis on the campaign trail: None of the Republican presidential candidates have anything new to say on the topic that we haven’t already heard from the GOP, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, for the last 30 years. Their proposed strategy hasn’t changed an iota since Ronald Reagan ran for president: It’s still all about cutting taxes and slashing regulations.

And there’s a big problem with that. Because whether or not you believe that the current unemployment problem is cyclical — that is, part of the normal ups and down of the business cycle — or structural — a more or less permanent response to a profoundly changing economy — the Republican platform is toothless. On the one hand, it’s hard to combat a cyclical problem with the same policy proposals that one puts in place in good times or bad, and on the other, it’s arguable that the structural problems in the U.S. economy are, at least in part, a consequence of decades of low taxes and deregulatory philosophy.

A tour of the GOP candidates’ websites is revealing. Ron Paul’s website doesn’t even mention either “jobs” or “unemployment” under the category of “issues.” The closest he gets is advocating the passage of more anti-union “right to work” laws. Rick Santorum’s Where I Stand page tells us that he believes in American “Exceptionalism,” is a “Champion of Faith and Families” and makes clear that he really, really opposes gay marriage; but it has no section devoted to either jobs or unemployment. Newt Gingrich does manage to include a page on “Jobs and the Economy” but somehow can’t bring himself to utter the word “unemployment.”

To his credit, Mitt Romney is the only Republican candidate whose website includes a comprehensive (87-page!) plan announcing his economic agenda. If you’re looking for a full-throated lambasting of Obama’s management of the economy, along with complaints about high unemployment, that’s where you’ll find it, a fact that, at first glance, would seem to make Romney a little more suited for electoral success than his current poll numbers would indicate.

But a closer look at Romney’s plan — or Gingrich’s, for that matter — reveals why neither he nor his fellow GOP pretenders to the White House throne are making a bigger deal of the plight of the jobless. They just don’t have anything fresh to say.

Romney’s prescription for an economy that isn’t producing enough jobs is to reduce taxes on savings and investment, eliminate the “death” tax, and cut corporate taxes. As for regulatory policy, for starters, he promises to repeal “Obamacare” and Dodd-Frank, as well as “review and eliminate” all other Obama-era regulations. But this agenda doesn’t separate him from his fellow GOP presidential candidates. He just spells out the party line in greater detail. If anything, Gingrich and Paul are further to the right — advocating even more extreme tax cuts and greater swaths of regulatory slash-and-burning.

So what does this mean for unemployment?

For the last few years, economists — left, right and middle — have been arguing heatedly about the nature of the current crisis. As noted above, there are two main competing theories — the spike in unemployment is either cyclical or structural.

Cyclical unemployment presumes that the key problem in the economy is a lack of demand. With no consumer appetite for goods or services, companies have to lay off workers. Consequently, there are more people looking for jobs than jobs available.

Structural employment speaks to a mismatch between the jobs that are available and the skills of workers who need jobs. If manufacturing moves to China, then the U.S. suddenly has a great many manufacturing workers who are ill-suited to fill the openings in the booming healthcare sector.

There are different policy options available depending upon what you think the nature of the employment crisis is. If the problem is cyclical, the answer, at least from a Keynesian liberal point of view, is stimulus. Government spending works to counteract the downturn in the business cycle, either by creating jobs directly (infrastructure spending, assistance to state and local governments) or by putting money in people’s pocket — food stamps, unemployment benefits, et cetera. More money creates more demand, resulting in more jobs.

If the problem is structural, the challenge is bigger. Government needs to aggressively retrain workers, or engage in industrial policy that targets strategic sectors, or tinker with trade policy.

Some liberal economists, led by Paul Krugman, are convinced that our current crisis is mostly cyclical. They point to the fact that nearly every job sector suffered huge losses in the recession (if the problem was structural, you’d see an uneven distribution of job losses) and to the huge mismatch between the number of job openings and the number of workers seeking jobs.

But it doesn’t have to be either/or. We could be working our way through the worst of both worlds — a situation in which a massive cyclical downturn exacerbates the negative effects of structural changes decades in the making. We know that the dual forces of globalization and technological progress have treated the American middle class harshly. If a machine or a Chinese laborer can do the job — it’s gone.

In an insightful piece in the National Journal last November, Michael Hirsh made a provocative case that there has been a steady rise in long-term unemployment over the last 30 years that transcends the recession-recovery cycle. He argues that we attribute this in part to the supremacy of free-market policies that have exacerbated income inequality, weakened the safety net, and ended up making American workers more vulnerable in a competitive world.

If that’s true, where does that leave the Republican candidates? We already know that they’re completely averse to counter-cyclical government spending, and indeed, their opposition to any kind of tax increases has effectively crippled the federal government’s ability to act in a robust, fiscally prudent manner when the economy hits a downturn. But if the problem is structural, then their low tax, deregulatory agenda just continues us down the same path we’re already on. It leaves us even more defenseless against a changing world. We’re already enjoying historically low levels of taxation. We’ve already loosened up the rules restricting Wall Street’s freedom. And look where that’s got us!

The vast majority of the job losses contributing to today’s high unemployment came before a single Obama policy took effect. The architects of the world that delivered us the Great Recession believed exactly what the current crop of Republican presidential candidates are advocating. If I was them, I’d be keeping my lips zipped too.

——

Salon exclusive: “F**KED: The United States of Unemployment,” a series by filmmaker Immy Humes

In “F**ked: The United States of Unemployment” — a new Salon series that will chronicle this important yet largely untold story — Academy Award-nominated director Immy Humes traces the birth and evolution of the 99ers movement. Over the course of the series, Humes will explore her personal struggle with long-term unemployment, the struggles of her fellow 99ers, and confront the stigma of what it’s like to be jobless in America today.

Salon is committed to telling the story of the unemployed as part of the American Spring. At noon Tuesday (ET), we’ll publish Andrew Leonard’s story on the state of the unemployed, and ask why the jobless problem is not a more resonant political issue during this election year.

And we want to hear your stories. The Great Recession has left millions unemployed and desperately seeking work — and yet Republican candidates still recycle the same tired lines about poor work habits and food stamps. Tell us what it’s really like to be out of work in this economy on Open Salon. We’ll cross-post some of your stories here on Salon.

“The mystery of our day is why 30 million Americans remain so invisible, and silent, after so long a time in the hell of unemployment,” said Humes, a filmmaker who has faced the grim reality of unemployment herself. “This series gives a voice to these people who are so often ignored as they hunt for jobs, organize to fight economic injustice, and deal with the stigma of being out of work.”

“F**cked” follows a diverse group of New York City-area 99ers from food pantries to marches to tense confrontations at Occupy Wall Street, tracing the roller-coaster lives of those desperately struggling to survive in the worst economy since the 1930s.

Salon’s goal with this series is not only to show the human impact of our nation’s deteriorating social safety net, but also inspire a conversation with you, our readers and viewers, about what America should be doing to confront this unemployment crisis. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for more articles, call-outs on Open Salon, live webcasts and events where you’ll have a chance to engage on this topic with Humes, 99ers, Salon writers and leaders of national economic justice organizations.

Salon is excited to be partnering on this six-episode series with Humes, a New York City-based documentary filmmaker who has produced stories for PBS, NBC News and Michael Moore – and we look forward to hearing from you on how American can get un-f**cked.

Update: Announcing the F**ked Preview Webcast– Join Immy Humes, the director of Salon’s new video series, for a sneak preview of “F**ked” episode one and a live webcast Q&A on January 23 at noon, EST. Salon Core members, log in and click “RSVP” on the Core landing page for webcast link and details.