Biden imposed work requirements to unemployment insurance
With 18 million more Americans on unemployment insurance than last year, you’d think the White House would have their back. Instead Joe Biden said “go back to your low wage job or else". Agreeing with Mitch McConnell that unemployment insurance leads to welfare queens. The Biden administration seems stuck in the 1990s ideology where welfare queens are real (like the tooth fairy), people hate government programs, Wall Street is popular, and Democrats have no real leverage. In reality they do, they just don’t want to use it.
With full control of the government Democrats have an opportunity to make a once in a decade investment infrastructure, taxes, education and put their opponents into minority status once and for all. And more importantly a once-in-a-lifetime chance to paint Republicans as callous and cold for a generation. And he’s already blowing it by giving in to Republicans arguments.
The GOP and big businesses have been gaslighting about a labor shortage, when in reality people want to work, just not for less money. 6.2% of Americans who are unemployed would happily work for companies if they raised their wages and offered more benefits. Dan Price, the CEO of Gravity payments, proved the benefits of raising wages for his lowest paid employees and saw net positive benefits. And public pressure from the White House could make his case as an example of how business can attract workers, yet they haven’t.
Unemployment insurance isn’t much
But how much is that compared to the federal minimum wage? How much would $300 a week be for a standard job? Let’s see $300 a week in unemployment divided by 40 hours comes out to $7.50 an hour, for 26 weeks.
Twenty states have not raised their wages above $7.25 an hour wage including the battleground states of North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. In essence Biden cut weekly wages for low wage employees in 20 states by the equivalent of $0.50 in the middle of the worst pandemic in a century. That is something you would expect from Donald Trump, not a so called Democrat. Instead of standing up for workers and giving them time to reevaluate and find better opportunities, he told them to go back your shitty low wage job.
When presented with an opportunity to publicly call on medium to large businesses (i.e. Arby’s, Sonic, Walmart) to raise their wages to attract eager workers, instead he bought into the racist welfare queen stereotype perpetuated by Ronald Reagan. And to make matters worse imposed work-requirements for low-wage workers to go back to their low wages jobs
He had an opportunity to get rid of the welfare queen racist stereotype, instead he chose to promote it and cut off aid to Americans barely struggling to pay the bills.
