Welfare becomes a job killing crutch for some
The Washington Post inadvertently stumbled across the truth in a Dec 12th piece titled: “In Liberty County, workers who quit feel liberated, but the community discovers a powerful downside.”
The story intends to show the community impacts, particularly on small businesses in the small Georgia coastal county of Liberty, which is located just south of Savannah. And the piece does successfully chronicle the effects of people quitting the jobs they held before the pandemic. The net takeaway is that small businesses are most adversely impacted because they neither can pay the money demanded by quitting workers nor do they have the number of employees to allow them to shift their labor costs to jobs that have suddenly become difficult to fill.
But this is where the Post gave away the real story. The article states the following, “Workers who have stepped away from full-time jobs say the pandemic helped them discover they can survive on occasional gig work and government benefits.” Note the critical role that welfare plays in this abandonment of lower-wage jobs. To the surprise of absolutely no one, people have discovered that having the flexibility to do other things is easier than getting up every morning and going to work. And it all depends upon a simple something, the government competing for labor by subsidizing unemployment. Now, I’m not talking about traditional unemployment benefits, which act as insurance policies as employers and employees pay into a state unemployment insurance fund to cover layoffs. Instead, the government benefits referenced are everything from housing and food assistance to the ‘stimmy checks’ given to people under a certain income level just because they were adult age and breathing.
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Democrat politicians who have never run a business make the unrealistic assertion that these businesses should just increase pay. That is the same as telling them to go bankrupt. The more obvious answer is to reduce welfare benefits when people refuse a job.
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