Hell even if no one actually wanted to work, that's still something you have to deal with as a business the same way you have to deal with if no one wants to buy what you're selling
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
There’s a different narrative that goes like this: those companies fired a bunch of people during lockdown, and the government decided to intervene and give them money (not enough to cover the rent and food expenses while lockdown)
Have some “profiteered” from that? Probably. It’s a big number of people. For a lot of people it wasn’t enough. So they found other ways to survive.
Now the companies (who let’s remember, shacked everyone in the first place) want to go back to how things were before. With same rates. And the pandemic hasn’t finished yet (there’s new variants going on). In this context, would it be wise for people to go back? A lot of them have been forced into finding something else (which is more pandemic-resilient). Cutting expenses, moving out of big cities, etc. Another lockdown and they would be fired again.
It looks like a bad deal to me.
Oh you mean when the government essentially shut down their businesses?
It's a bullshit argument, the pandemic causes a downturn for in-person businesses anyway.
Also, offices and other businesses that kept open had issues with staffing due to sickness. Go figure...
They are unable or unwilling to adapt, and did not have enough savings to continue fulfilling their workers employment contracts.
Then the government took care of its citizens financial welfare.
I am not seeing any governmental missteps here. Can you make it more clear where they went wrong?
No. A global pandemic caused disease and death. Governments imposed lockdowns.
Maybe that was the right course of action, maybe it wasn't. But it's done now, and now we have to pay for the cost of the Covid response, something we'll probably be doing for the rest of our lives.
The argument is only rhetorical because all governments in every country imposed some sort of lockdown or everyone stayed home willingly.
For this kind of people, capitalist supremacists, sacrifice of human lives to the market is ok, might be "sad" but it's necessary in their worldview.
[0] https://kitanyaharrison.medium.com/the-economy-of-moloch-hum...
Hold on now, there is just not that many of the rich to eat!
The mental health problems for many have been enormous.
There are huge educational gaps that have been created due to missed school.
Inflation from overspending is ruining many peoples lives.
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/total-covid-relief-unemployment-in...
[2] https://twitter.com/MarcGoldwein/status/1371277417600454658
You’re right that the maximum amount of money an individual could have received from the government is quite high. But for every household that received more than the 13k I stated above, other households received proportionally less. (Which is to say while undoubtably some people lived the meme you mentioned, the vast majority of people weren’t given that much money) Plus it doesn’t change the main point that the spending stopped in Sept 2021. We’re two months off from it having been a year since extra unemployment benefits were a factor.
Estimates range from 50k [1] to 100k [2]. People were getting $600 per week in federal unemployment alone [3], which is more than many jobs pay.
> NPR spoke to Katharine Thomas, who works the cash register at a small food co-op in Wisconsin. Thomas remembers seeing people around her lose jobs and collect the state unemployment income plus the extra federal relief of $600 a week.
> "I felt very angry," she says. "I have to go to work. And I make less money, being essential. $600 a week — that's almost the whole paycheck for me. Even with hazard pay, I still don't make that much money."
[1] https://taxfoundation.org/total-covid-relief-unemployment-in...
[2] https://twitter.com/MarcGoldwein/status/1371478357418909703
[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/27/895674685/-600-a-week-poverty...
And the amount of benefits received is calculated based on people with children earning $60k per year in GA and $80k in MA (a very high cost of living state). Either way, both of these figures are above median incomes, so is the claim here that people with above median incomes quit their jobs in order to collect temporary benefits and then never re entered the workforce?
No possible way that ended ages ago but is still being used as a talking point for why shitty companies can’t respond to systematic changes in the market
Your comment would be fine without the last paragraph. Actually it would have been fine with just the one substantive sentence ("The government gave out [etc.]")
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
IIRC, car thefts do tend to be reported because otherwise insurance won't pay out, and those are certainly up (at least in some areas, I don't know about thr whole country).
Mobs are literally going into malls and basically stealing everything in one specific store.
Homeless people are killing people, shoving people into running trains and in a lot of cases the victims are women.
Package theft (porch pirates) is at an all time high.
Mass Murders (gunning down multiple people) is happening every day in the united states.
But yeah I guess other than that, it's really not happening.
People having easily carried valuable items unattended on their porch which is easily accessible to any random passerby for hours at a time is at an all time high.
It used to be somewhat of a hassle to convince a delivery company to leave anything worth more than a few dollars anywhere there wasn't someone to sign for the delivery.
>More than two-thirds of the country's 40 most populous cities saw more homicides last year than in 2020, according to a CNN analysis of police department data.
>Ten of those cities recorded more homicides in 2021 than any other year on record. Those are Philadelphia; Austin, Texas; Columbus, Ohio; Indianapolis; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; Louisville, Kentucky; Milwaukee; Albuquerque, New Mexico; and Tucson, Arizona. Minneapolis tied its previous record number of homicides, with 97 in the years 1997 and 2021.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/03/us/homicide-rate-us-statistic...
on edit: however the article doesn't seem to tell anything about property crimes or other things that lead to people getting money out of it, it seems more concerned with violence (which I guess should be concerned with) but then I still don't know, hey how are all these people who don't want to work getting by. It's not really the kind of problem you can assault your way out of.