When you incentivize unemployment, you get unemployment
The April jobs report came out today and for some reason people are stunned that the unemployment rate ticked up. Apparently they were expecting a million jobs created in April. Instead, payroll employment only rose by 266,000. But that’s what happens when you incentivize unemployment.
If you pay people more for not working, what’s the incentive to go look for a job?
Whenever you incentivize something, you get more of it.
This isn’t rocket science.
Yet the Biden White House was caught flat-footed.
Apparently old Joe was planning an 11:30 am Victory Lap press event to brag about the new jobs numbers.
Whether he will still emerge from his hidey hole to do so remains to be seen.
Does the so-called “smart set” in DC not understand that if you incentivize unemployment, you get unemployment? Or do they know that’s the case and are perfectly fine incentivizing unemployment?
Are they stupid or is this by design?
Honestly, I don’t know which worries me more.
Many states are facing a worker shortage because Biden’s “Help is on the way” COVID “relief” bill made it more profitable to stay unemployed than to go back to work.
It used to be that the only way you got unemployment benefits was to show that you are actively looking for a job. But with this extended unemployment, you don’t need to actively look for a job to continue drawing a weekly check.
When you incentivize people to stay home, they aren’t going to go back to work.
There’s an episode of “Downton Abbey” where a young widowed mother applies to be a house maid at the Abbey. Mrs. Hughes is puzzled since a woman with a child rarely if ever works outside the home. But the young widow explains it simply. She has no husband and, as she tells Mrs. Hughes, “I have to earn.”
The incentive for holding a job is simple: you have to earn in order to pay your bills and take care of yourself.
But now that incentive to earn is gone.
Why work? Why earn? Why take the trouble when the Federal Government has extended unemployment indefinitely and removed the requirement that you actively look for a job?
It doesn’t take an economist to understand that this would be the outcome.
And yet the news media and the Biden White House are gob-smacked that the million jobs they expected didn’t happen.
Honestly, we are either governed by supremely stupid people or we’re governed by people who want to wreck our economy.
Joe Biden has never done anything to boost employment. Sure, he likes to brag about how he “saved the economy” back in 2009, but it’s a lie. Anyone with half a brain should’ve seen this coming.
And yet, short-sighted brainless idiots voted for Biden anyway.
But, no mean tweets, am I right?
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