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Biden Is Subsidizing Unemployment

Is this intentional?

Annapolis, where I live, has great seafood. A friend was in town recently and she had to try crab cakes. So we went to a perfect place for it and I noticed the market price had gone sky high. I asked the owner why. He said it had at least tripled because people were making so much off unemployment benefits that nobody wanted to work to bring the crabs to market. Thus the labor cost went through the roof.

As Thomas Sowell said, “If you subsidize something you get more of it.” With the never-ending unemployment gravy train at the state level with federal add ons, government is subsidizing unemployment. Is it intentional?

It’s quite true that Democrats want people reliant on government benefits for sustenance like a junkie wants to hook people on heroin. As such, big government takes the place of individual initiative and the addict makes sure to keep his pusher in office. Andy Pudzer, currently a Senior Fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Public Policy, knows that. He comments below.

Pudzer: Contrary what we’re hearing from the Biden administration, the solution to our labor market problems is not massive government spending designed to create jobs. There are already 10.9 million openings, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, but only 7.7 million people are actively looking for work. So, businesses are finding it increasingly difficult to fill those openings which is why the jobs numbers are so dismal. Stated simply, the problem is a shortage of workers not a shortage of job openings. Neither government spending intended to create more jobs nor government spending that discourages work will solve that problem.

To the contrary, as both August’s and September’s dismal jobs number show, such spending exacerbates the problem. While President Biden may not see it, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., does. Last month he noted that “We have 11 million jobs that we haven’t filled, 8 million people still unemployed. Something’s not matching up here.” Indeed.

In his press conference following the release of the disappointing September jobs report  on Friday (194,000 jobs created, 500,000 anticipated), Biden claimed that the unemployment rate dropping to 4.8% was a sign of recovery. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

The unemployment rate is only under 4.8% because the labor force, that is the number of people working or actively looking for work, is near historic lows. Again, the problem is a shortage of workers. In September, 183,000 people dropped out of the labor force and the participation rate declined to 61.6%. Were the labor participation rate at 63.3%, the rate we had under President Trump in February 2020, unemployment in September would have been a discouraging 7.3%.

Yet, rather than programs that encourage people to return to work, Biden and his Democrat allies want to increase government spending with much of it going to expand or create new government entitlements that will further discourage people from working. We’re talking huge – massive – increased spending.

On top of the $5.3 trillion we spent on a bipartisan basis during the pandemic and the $1.9 trillion the Democrats unilaterally authorized in March, Biden and the Democrats now want to pass an additional $1.1 trillion “human infrastructure” bill and a $3.5 trillion ($5.5 trillion properly scored) spending extravaganza with cradle to grave government benefits…

President Biden, if you want to lift people out of poverty, if you want better jobs numbers, if you want people to succeed and become self-reliant, please, stop the government spending spree! It’s time we all got back to work.

For more from David Kamioner read him at davidkamioner.substack.com

This piece was written by David Kamioner on October 11, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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