Employer provided healthcare is the dumbest idea ever, it should be outlawed. I don’t care what it’s replaced with just as long as it’s gone.
From 1862 to 1934, over 1.6 million homesteads were created through the Federal Government. For a filing fee of $18 (~$200--$500 in 2020), and five years sweat equity, a 21 year old male could claim 5-640 acres by building on and working it. Homesteading continued as a vastly reduced practice, though remaining an option, until 1976 in the lower 48 and Alaska until 1986. Open range provided for additional livilihood based on unowned acreage for ranchers, and mining stakes were prospected throughout the West. But by 1890, the notion that there was unsettled land for the taking had passed; the frontier was closed.
Not that this access was available to all; blacks, Native Americans (this was originally their land), Mexicans, Chinese, Catholics, and other non-Anglo groups were routinely denied rights to land.
Prior to 1860, unorganised squatting was common. A Free Soil movement, based in part of free or cheap land grants to white farmers also emerged.
Too at the time, wage labour was relatively uncommon -- many households were effectively their own businesses, most farmsteads, others practicing trades or professions. The rise of factories, railroads, steel mills, and coal mines gradually shifted this balance. But exposure to the money economy was often lower than now. Less upside perhaps, but also less systemic risk for most households.
Life expectencies were far lower than today: 49.3 years in 1901, 60.2 in 1934, 78.8 today. Pensions tended to be private, often failing, or support offered through multigenerational households (an idea whose time may be returning). Those living to old age often found themselves with no means of subsistence. Social Security had a solid basis in real lived pain.
There were frequent economic crises and panics.
You may have heard of the Joads. There's a truth behind that fiction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grapes_of_Wrath
A lot of those people not working are lower class. A lot of professional jobs just shifted to work from home.
We need that one third of Americans working. They need opportunity. They aren't getting it.
Yes, there are some jobs that we do need done and are safe to do, but the labor bubble probably isn't big enough to accommodate all of those currently suffering.
If I hadn't tried to establish an earned income, suicide would have been my only way out of my predicament. No one was going to rescue me.
With a third of people not working, we don't have the means to rescue everyone. The only way to fix this mess is to find ways to get people working again. There is no other real solution.
I get really tired of hearing pie in the sky talk of how people in lousy circumstances "shouldn't have to" do x, y or z. In practice, it winds up being a means to trap them there and give them no way out.
Other countries seem to manage it. Bigger income taxes and use the money to help those who are out of work
I know it may seem like your actions are being criticised, I really don't think that's the case, we're all grateful for the efforts that you're making. But as someone else pointed out, you're walking through the trenches distributing band-aids. At the same time we need to ask ourselves why there are so many people in the trenches in the first place, whilst others are living in mansions 200 miles behind the front lines.
Don't tax the job creators! Those billionaires earned every penny and didn't exploit anyone! We need to cut Amazon's taxes or they might not build another distribution center here that pays less than a living wage!
The current course America has now is to pretend things are normal during an ongoing disaster. It hasn’t been working. People working low wage jobs during this just because they’re struggling to pay rent are quite miserable—more so than before.
The problem is systemic. We are getting really close to the economic events that have happened during the Weimar Republic. We are going to see a huge increase in radicalization and instability if the article is correct. It won't end in a world war but it could get very violent.
People will start squatting in vacant buildings together. Groups that live together will create their own "pet" system of governance that will appear to solve these problems and then there will be rivalrous behavior among them like gangs fighting each other.
The best thing you can do is keep them busy with a job.