Montana to cancel unemployment benefits to address severe workforce shortage
money.yahoo.com
money.yahoo.com
https://lmi.mt.gov/_docs/Publications/LMI-Pubs/Labor-Market-...
Missoula public schools were still operating with a remote day per week when those numbers were collected, it’s really hard to work with a young kid in need of care an extra day per week. So it’s not surprising the workforce size reduced.
In light of this, this change seems particularly cruel.
I can’t tell which ‘side’ you are referring to.
Do you really need us to spell it out?
America was and continues to be built in large part by wage theft and labor exploitation. We don’t provide the social support services that are taken for granted in first-world countries like Canada, because doing so conflicts with the strongly-held belief — the ideology — that the best way to support the poor is to ensure that they’re employed in a job, no matter how terrible the working conditions or pay. Workers are told that this is a “ladder of success”, but upward mobility has stalled due to the wealth being drained out of the system into the ultra-wealthy and their families. Workers are encouraged to work for local businesses, who are themselves going bankrupt and collapsing at the swordpoints of Walmart, Amazon, and Covid. Health care costs have skyrocketed, health insurance is only offered to a subset of the workforce, and minimum wage doesn’t cover rent, food, and health care (pick one only).
So, Montana is canceling unemployment as a way to force people to work at jobs they otherwise wouldn’t work at. This forces people back into the modern enslavement system, and takes for granted that enough employers are left in Montana to hire those workers. Rather than assessing whether enough jobs exist for their citizens and then requiring businesses to pay a reasonable wage that covers living costs, or offering benefits to attract workers, the state of Montana will simply block unemployment benefits. Employers that offer miserable wages, no health insurance, and poor working conditions are expected to see an increase in workers applying for those roles, further weakening the negotiating position of workers versus employers.
The best analogy, then, for the perceived cruelty of these motivations is, in these modified words of the consultant from “Office Space”:
“We fixed the glitch. So they won’t be receiving an unemployment check anymore. So it’ll just work itself out naturally.”
Of those options, I think you meant this to be an insulting and dismissive comment, wherein you jokingly compare me to a dead man in order to weaken or diminish the views represented in my detailed writeup of the 'unspoken' viewpoint referenced upthread. If so, you will find that Hacker News is not a reliably effective venue for that sort of manipulation of others. If I'm wrong in my interpretation, I of course welcome clarification. :)
didn't even know he was dead-- read his book not that long ago. not sure what the fuck you're on about comparing people to dead people-- are we just supposed to stop speaking of the dead altogether?
Suggesting the US is not a first world country further weakens this entire comment.
By your own statement, if they raise the wage, people will go back to work. This "solution" is just kicking the legs out from under people who are just barely able to stand as it is.
Where I am from I can get 90% of my previous paycheck up to a max of approx 3200 USD a month for the first two years.
Then they start to drop off quite fast to a much lower buttom.
So even if a new job was lower than the 3200 USD I could be getting I would still be incentivised to get a new job before the high benefits runs out.
I think you’re advocating for UBI. Maybe UBI is a better idea, but UI is not that.
If someone has decided to stop looking for work so that they can stay home and care for a sick family member, or take care of a child, then they are no longer counted towards the unemployment rate, even though overall workforce participation has declined.
The simple truth is that workforce participation in Montana (and the rest of the US) is actually quite high right now, especially given the pandemic context.
This policy is simply misguided, period. It targets the wrong people for the wrong things to solve a problem that doesn't exist. And it's actively harming the people who elected the government. All because the people making decisions choose to believe spin and not truths.
Once you exhaust your benefit, or if you decide not to claim, you aren't counted. Some business models actually factor in usage of the unemployment system to provide continuity of workforce via keeping people solvent between rehires, further diluting the utility of the metric.
After a certain age, there is a marked reluctance to hire on older workers that I've noticed, and far fewer older applicants in at least my field than I expected. It is not uncommon in so.e parts of the country for some people to be completely unaware that unemployment is even a thing they can avail themselves of, or if there is, there's so much stigma and saber rattling at "those damn fraudsters" that after you hear it enough you start to wonder whether you should really be collecting it at all.
BLS - Better Lying with Statistics
Also if the jobs are so badly payed that it's going in the direction of it being better to not work even if there is no money for unemployed people you also can have a labor shortage. (Just an example, so physical taxing job which which also has a high chance of damaging your clothes and doesn't provide clothes for you can make you cost more money due to increased living cost (clothes, more food) then you might earn.)
I'm not saying that any of this things are happening, just that you totally can have both high unemployment and a servere labor shortage , either due to qualifications or due to inhuman working conditions.
The local turkey processing plant has a huge sign on bonus right now for the same reason, just to try and coax people back to work.
But business can't offer $2500 and rake in the applications. When you're getting $2400 a month for sitting around watching movies all day, it is going to take a lot to move the needle and make you want to go back to work.
Even if they increase it to be somewhat more than the government is paying people, you're still competing with them getting income for doing absolutely nothing.
This is all coming from someone that is also getting unemployment. However, it's less than I normally make - significantly so, depending on the week. It's a shame state unemployment systems apparently couldn't cope with a percentage increase rather than a flat number.
Red states are different than blue states, and that's ok. What seems cruel/perveted/bigoted/anarchistic/mean-spirited/unpatriotic in one place is not in the other.
It has a lot to do with the unspoken social contract of the region. The best news: If you're stuck in a state that doesn't fit you, it's a free country, you can move to one that better aligns.
It implied that the data said it was the benefits causing the lack of employees when their own labor bureau was saying it was pandemic related issues.
In Canada with CERB ($400/week), it's been like being a school kid on summer break all over again. You have very little money, but can spend endless days reconnecting with your friends, hiking, playing games, learning music, et cetera.
Not many people want to get a job - as it's just as fun as being the only kid in your group who got a job at 17. You might be making money, but everyone else is making out at the midnight bonfire
The horror! Sounds like these employers need to raise wages to do better than the absolute minimum. If higher paying jobs are available, people will work. And some people still won't, but those people weren't going to work much anyway.
Setting the right level for benefits is hard: Either the basic income is high enough to provide for a good life (why would I get a job), or it's not high enough to pay for food, shelter, bills (why do we treat our unemployed people this badly).
Rising the wages across the board raises prices sooner or later. That probably moves the unemployment money from the former category to the latter via inflation, which does motivate people to get a job, but screws the people who can't get a job.
I have no solutions to offer. This is a gnarly problem, featured for example in the Grasshopper and the Ant, first recorded in Aesop's fables from ~600BC. Enjoying life is wonderful, but if everyone enjoys life, we'll all starve.
Maybe the solution is in the middle: make work time as little as possible so people who work can also enjoy life and pay them according to that time.
Jack Ma endorses China’s controversial (996) 12 hours a day, 6 days a week work culture
Part of technological and societal progress is that we don’t use the threat of starvation for people to better for themselves. We have enough money to bring up the bottom economic class and still let the top have their private cruise ships.
If you doubled ALL federal income taxes in the US, you could pay each adult US citizen ~$1500/mo in UBI.
The math is daunting because the number of people is so high.
Do you seriously think it’s a good idea to point guns at people doing the work and tell them to give you 80-100% of their pay because you think you deserve it for doing nothing?
Only a violent sociopath would do that, right? Please tell me how your proposal is different.
I don’t see any viable path to paying UBI at those relatively low levels because the tax burden on people and companies is too high. (And frankly, $750/mo isn’t enough to accomplish what the UBI advocates want to promise which is to make work literally optional.)
Morally and politically, I can’t see how to make UBI replace social security. You might be able to make reduced UBI payments to seniors, but at some point you have to ask “what does the U in UBI stand for?”
If UBI is less generous than Social Security, then you have a problem.
You have lots of retirees (15% of the population) who have been promised Social Security and have retired on that basis. You also have lots of people that are relatively near retirement that will be in the streets with pitchforks if you threaten their benefits: Social Security is the original third rail of American politics - touch it and you die.
You basically need to allow people to choose whether to get UBI or stay in Social Security. This creates a gigantic fiscal bulge because you end up funding Social Security for everyone for whom it represents a better deal.
If UBI is more generous than Social Security, then you also have a problem. You are effectively exchanging it like-for-like and there's no extra tax take to spread around.
Earned benefits like unemployment, disability, and social security are usually not targeted for replacement by UBI, and it is dubious that it makes them unnecessary (especially UI/DI, given benefit levels) unless it is at a very high level.
Stop beating that strawman! He's already dead.
And of course doubling rates will not double revenue, because incentives really are a thing and a change this large would have large incentive-mediated effects, including people ending up with more compensation in non-taxable form (leisure, respect, non-taxable perqs, etc). The only way to double _revenue_ is for rates to rise even more, or more likely to start affecting more people (i.e. the top rate starting to apply at lower income levels).
Now those are marginal, not average, rates. But just to be clear, right now US government (federal, state, local) spending is ~46% of GDP. Federal spending on its own is ~30% of GDP. If we are talking about doubling that second number, overall government spending would be 76% of GDP. Which generally means the _average_ tax burden across all people would be 76% of income (though some of that can get hidden via corporate income taxes and whatnot). There will absolutely have to be people with average tax burdens > 80% to suport that. That's assuming that we don't finance things by borrowing, of course; 1/3 of US government spending right now is not even coming from tax revenue.
It might also be instructive to compare 76% government spending to the table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen... to see how that measures up against other countries.
Regardless, I don't know why I get pulled into debates with people who view taxes as theft instead of the price of a civilized society. Neither of us are ever going to change our world views based on the arguments of another.
Sure. Neither is any country providing a $750/month UBI, much less $1500/month, from taxes. (Some countries do provide that sort of thing for citizens from oil revenues or whatnot.)
> I'd happily trade scandi taxes for scandi safety nets and worker protections. I think those max out at ~ 50%?
~50 govt revenue as a fraction of GDP, yes. A lot of that is VAT, not income taxes, of course.
But also, that's not the same as the discussion above about UBI. Yes, a Scandinavian-style safety net can be done at much lower taxation levels than "doubling the US federal revenues", especially people by and large don't abuse the safety net. Spending 1% of GDP on the military, not 3%, also helps a bit.
> people who view taxes as theft instead of the price of a civilized society
I have no idea where you got that from anything I said, and that is most certainly not how I view taxes.
> Neither of us are ever going to change our world views based on the arguments of another.
Honestly, it sounds like you have no idea what my world view even is...
Kuwait pays ~$10k per citizen, last I checked. A few countries pay citizens for having children too.
So, to recap... the formula for utopia is to destroy the environment by burning all of your natural resources, and enslave foreigners to do all your work. So progressive.
That's one of the "from oil revenues" cases I mentioned, indeed. Though are you claiming $10k/month? I'd love a source for that number; the last number I saw was ~$3k/month subsidy if you work in the private sector. Obviously if you work for the government directly you get whatever that salary is, which in Kuwait is pretty nice, but that's ostensibly a job, not a UBI.
But that’s not your choice. It’s interesting that you indicate disagreement with how the money is spent, but not how it is taken. This seems like the same concern for those they are taking it from. Can you imagine how a society would function if it were based on consent?
Why do you take weekends? Or go home in the evening? Why aren't you using your evenings to be a "productive member of society"?
For example, if I didn’t have to work myself, I could finally do some of the more ambitious contributions to OpenStreetMap that I have been dreaming of: adding all the missing house numbers for my county, for instance. Then society as a whole benefit from that libre resource even if I as a contributor was not paid a salary for it. By the same token, some of the most active Wikipedia editors are able to dedicate such enormous time and effort because, for whatever reason, they do not work. Yet all of us here benefit day in and day out from what they do.
If you double the tax rate, you won't double the tax revenue. There's a big chance that the revenue would go down.
Another thing is, that money is not the wealth; productivity is. So if you want to pay UBI to everyone and want to keep the same purchase power of the dollar, you have to preserve productivity at the national level (GDP is a measure; but you need that specific physical output as products and services, not money). Which you won't, if a part of population would stop working.
A very mature, robust UBI might, but we’re far from being able to support that. Realistically, a near term UBI increases opportunity and aggregate economic performance by reducing perverse incentives and friction in means-tested welfare programs.
It takes about $7350/year/person (average household size weighted by population is around 3.4, interpolating between poverty line by household size numbers that’s about $24,500 annual household poverty line) to have an on-average poverty-line-level UBI, which costs $2.4 trillion/year.
That’s 11% of GDP (and not all ofnit additional, because many existing poverty support programs would be subsumed), which is enormous but probably not unsustainable with political will—but you aren’t realistically, no matter how much political will there is, be able to maintain enough of a multiple to make work really unnecessary for most people—poverty level income after government transfers isn’t a “living income” level (which is why ”living wage” efforts typically target an income level that starts, as a baseline, about 4× higher for full-time work.)
Does it actually have to though? If a company is still profitable it doesn't actually have to raise its prices just because its profits go down.
Next up, someone who saw Founder is going to point out that McDonalds makes money from rent, not selling food. Sure, that might be true for McDonalds-the-corporation, but the McDonalds-down-the-street franchise will have to come up with the payroll money somehow.
Your average business is way less profitable than you think.
Edit: it's funny how I'm modded down, but this is straight up 'Socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the poor'. And it's doubly insulting that the unemployment "insurance" is being pulled en masse, with only regard to the monied elite.
Then again, I'd expect no less coming from a den of VC's and their ilk. They certainly don't care about the human.
That said, do we need so many McDonald's? If, say, half of them closed, but the people who worked there had better lives and more free time, I'm inclined to believe the world would benefit. So maybe we end up with fewer low-skill jobs, but ultimately was society really benefiting greatly from that labor anyways?
And if the answer is "yes", ok, that's probably a case for the government to start providing or assisting in that service.
a) Customers having higher salaries
b) Property being massively more expensive
c) In the case of NYC, much higher property taxes
d) Yes, perhaps the cost of labor as well
Seems really hard to draw any conclusion given all of that.
It absolutely disproves the statement "McDonald's where minimum wage is $15 don't really charge that much more than the places where it's $7.25"
McDonalds charges >50% more in this comparison of $15 vs. federal minimum wage locales.
I'm not making any claims whatsoever about why the price is higher in NYC. I just want people to stop relying on the canard "McDonalds prices are similar everywhere" during this debate.
Because companies/executives are known to be altruistic?
If people are desperate for work, they are vulnerable to the absolutely disgusting way they are treated and exploited by employers.
I find that in tech that employers treat me fantastically because I have more of a value proposition and am thus bargaining from a stronger perspective.
If working is so bad that it's actively damaging to my mental and physical health, I would be doing everything I can to avoid it.
We can surely do better than that, but it takes empathy. For that reason, my hopes are tempered.
What a grim, zero-sum view. How about working and enjoying life?
I know it's a shocking idea, but it is possible.
Sometimes when that happens more money ends up in the local economy and hairdressers etc can charge more and pay more without pricing themselves out of the market.
It's the difference between an optimistic and inclusive economy and a depressive and retentive one which tries to minimise shared opportunity.
There is no magic here. If everyone charges more and pays more you have, on aggregate, gained nothing. That's the point, if merely raising nominal wages would make everyone better off we'd have a magic button to solve poverty.
You would reduce income inequality. People who earn money from labour would now earn more vs. people who earn money from capital gains. It would also incentivise investing into production companies rather than passive investments like real estate.
It would do the opposite. Investments with low to no labor costs would see increased investment as the returns are protected against rising labor costs.
High labor costs also incentivize automation of low level tasks traditional performed by low wage labor. Anybody who’s used a self checkout kiosk knows how that works.
This is not an argument to keeping people underpaid.
Eventually inflation catches up and we are back here again.
To be fair the real issue is the wealth gap.
More money in the hands of poorer people means more money circulation and demand.
Money in rich people’s hands means more investment.
Currently far more is in the hands of rich people so we have incredible amounts of investment dry powder waiting to be deployed, and riskier and less healthy ideas being funded.
Optimum consumption and investment is the ideal way forward, and everyone gets a bigger pie (except the environment)
Think of it as the owner has a percentage of revenue. So prices go up, they make more even if most of it is given as wages. Obviously, firms want to raise prices but are limited by the market because of competition. If everyone must raise prices then the competition element is removed.
So raise wages enough to convince people to move to Montana.
Except for the rampant price inflation in housing, healthcare, education, which has happened over the past few decades. The higher unemployment benefits reflect the actual cost of living. Wages (and service industry prices) rising are unfortunately more of a trailing correction than a leading cause.
If rents were lower, and goods and services were more expensive, then many people would earn more (since many low paying jobs are in retail and personal services). And it would be a lot easier to lower living expenses by just consuming less.
Just think about it, China gives you free shit, you take advantage of the free shit to make your nation grow faster. Trump says, we don't want your free shit (trade war). Biden says, thanks to your free shit we can grow our economy (infrastructure).
Of course if you do neither, the free shit piles up in your country, prices for everything go down and people are unemployed as a result.
And if its true, then tear the damn system down, because its failing us.
The scary part is the deficit we are incurring to pay for it. It's not sustainable. The benefits cannot be extended indefinitely.
EDIT: In Canada
Doesn't sound like a bad life to be honest. Good to hear we have a bright future if we ever get AI to take all the jobs.
Whatever you think of landlords, people do in general prefer to live indoors and landlords are in the business of offering that service.
Housing could absolutely be provided by companies or governments. In the US, government has an absolutely horrible track record of providing desirable housing (except perhaps military base officer housing).
Remove the carveouts against money laundering for real estate, the preferential tax treatment / mortgage interest deductibility for investment properties, things like that.
Why should airlines or manufacturers or other businesses be able to deduct the interest on their loans, while one specific sector cannot?
I want to make a distinction between productive use of capital and rent-seeking. If you're getting a loan in order to buy an existing piece of property and rent it out - that is not productive, it is rent seeking (since you generate cash flow from just holding onto an asset and not doing anything with it).
If you're building a new house or renovating/repairing the existing house with that loan, then the part that goes towards building/renovation is productive and the interest on that part of the loan should be deductible.
The point is that people can make a lot of money by buying up real estate "portfolios" and simply sitting on them to generate cashflow, pricing others who want to buy a home out of the market. This would even out the balance a bit and make holding onto lots of investment assets more expensive but buying your first home [relatively] more affordable.
It is very hard though when everyone else around you acts as though being on government assistance makes you some kind of a useless, good for nothing leech who doesn't even deserve to have food or a roof over their head.
How can one reconcile your hypothesis with the recent employment statistics: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/210409/dq210...
There is a clear uptake from record unemployment.
Having a good work in your life is still more fulfilling than just leisure for most people, on top of that, you can afford more things. Yes, shitty jobs have trouble finding people. I personally see that not as a downside, but rather an upside of the whole thing.
Much has been said about how much of a dead end this jobs are but I’d like to reiterate how incredibly difficult it is when you have no time to improve your lot in life. There’s so many statistics about how poverty and poverty jobs are a trap that most never escape in the US compared to other developed countries.
Work can provide meaning in various ways (care for colleagues, creative expression, a 'goal' to work towards, etc.) and the idea of having more money can be somewhat meaningful, of course (especially if you really need it!).
But there are tons of other meaningful and fulfilling things a person can do with their time, and I'm willing to bet that most people would prefer most of those over having to do 'stuff' for a 'boss/manager' in a hierarchical organization that might (in part) not provide much meaning other than making money for them and hopefully enough for yourself.
Hobbies are what we do for ourselves.
We can widen the definition of work to be far more inclusive, and then structure a program to compensate people for doing that work http://www.jobguarantee.org/
And since others do so much for me, it's only fair that I do something for them.
Nowadays, we have more productivity as a species if we do specific labor instead in order to feed ourselves, but the premise is the same. No work = no eat (at least until you have enough savings/investments to afford not to work). At least until theoretically automation takes all of the jobs.
Anyways, just clearing that up. I agree that the recipe to happiness probably includes a hefty dose of 'what we do for others'. I don't think I've met a person who was truly happy just slacking off and doing things just for themselves.
When it's about 'creative expression' it's really about oneself.
If you fill up gas in cars all day, your friend lays brick, someone else logs and mills, another frames ... then that's us working together to create warm homes.
So if we can do that without individuals siphoning off the top (or bottom) it works.
You're privileged bias is showing when you refer to hiking, playing games, learning music rather than trying to buy medication or keep a roof over your head.
This is honestly kind of true. I'm the only person in my friend group who has been working full time the entire pandemic and I've definitely been missing out on fun.
Oh well. Someone has to pay for CERB.
Shouldn't our miraculous technological advances and enormous wealth enable this lifestyle for anybody who wants it (rather than just the idle oligarch class, which has not only the luxury of not working, but the luxury of actual luxury to go with it?)
I find the title misleading, it's the pandemic $300 per week additional benefit that gets suspended not the whole unemployment benefits people looking for a job are entitled to (Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program).
Correct me if I am wrong.
Now, is the situation back to normal enough to justify it, should those unemployment benefits stay the same, etc. those are all important questions.
Politicians used to brag about those levels being full employment.
The question is how many people exited the workforce, because both unemployment benefits and minimum wage offer payments that just barely allow them not to starve to death.
Normally people would be incentivized to find work, because even minimum wage would offer a significant upgrade over unemployment benefits, but since minimum wage is so abysmally low they couldn't have set unemployment benefits much lower or people would have literally starved.
The sane solution of increasing minimum wage to incentivize people to find jobs while obvious is not very popular with wealthy political donors.
If you're literally scraping the barrel, you need to import more workers, or move jobs out of state, or automate some away etc.
The neoliberal view would be 'more immigration because you could expand' ergo 'unhealthy/unoptimized state, increase people to make more GDP'.
But that's only one view.
Given a flat population, it generally actually wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for example to 'let people go' to create more slack for times of economic swings.
Very low unemployment can only be characterized as 'unhealthy' from the view of 'maximizing GDP growth' for the most part.
That was before they began openly fudging the numbers. Following 2008 they began removing people from the unemployment numbers once their unemployment benefits expired.
The unemployment rate was never 5% after 2008 and it’s not 3.8% now, millions and millions of people have been written off by politicians using those fake numbers for their reelection campaigns.
The BLS unemployment rate that’s referenced here is the number of people looking for work who can’t find work [0] so it is meant to measure the percent of the labor force that isn’t working. There are six different rates estimated (U1-U6) and I’m not aware of any that stop counting once unemployment benefits run out. There is a specific stat (U1) to estimate those who have been unemployed for long periods.
[0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm [1] https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-economics/chapte...
> Unemployment insurance (UI) programs are administered at the state level and provide assistance to jobless people who are looking for work.
By definition those receiving unemployment are looking for work. Once you come off unemployment, you are not automatically considered unemployed and seeking work, instead the burden is on you to prove to the BLS you are actively looking for work, this is called marginally attached to the labor force but the catch all is discouraged workers a subset and nearly anyone unemployed that has run through their benefits and still not employed is nearly always going met this definition and they are not considered part of the labor force. (See your link - Who is not in the labor force? )
“Proving” to BLS just means answering a question on a survey, so it’s not burdensome compared to what is required to do continue unemployment insurance. So workers who run out of benefit and answer something like “yes, I’d like to work, am looking, and can’t find” will be included in U3.
There are other measures for underemployed, or people who gave up working, etc. I think those are U4-U6, described in the second link I posted.
I find lots of these arguments are people not understanding the unemployment measures or people arguing with different versions.
But on the ground it can be a tremendous burden, we are talking about people who may be avoiding calls because it’s creditors, we are talking about people who don’t have a phone (it’s impossible for most in power to even acknowledge there are people without a phone or even the continuity of continuous phone service - they point to a FCC pledge carriers signed not to do that, but the carriers have do it anyway).
There are many reasons this larger demographic of hidden workforce is not included in the BLS surveys to any meaningful degree, certainly the homeless are not, which I don’t believe in the homeless numbers either, or maybe more diplomatically I should say I believe they are political numbers.
Just as a example, early on we heard politicians discussing mortgages and rent, evictions protections, but once the lawmakers passed the stimulus have you heard any meaningful discussion about any of that? Pre pandemic there were 1M student loans defaulted per year, a long standing trend of adults living at home with parents in record numbers.
Before any of it can be addressed it needs to be acknowledged, it doesn’t help when both sides of the two party political system have consistently taken credit for record unemployment and record stock markets, or eviction protections or FCC pledges to waive late fees and not cut of service, it’s not all fake but it is fake to a meaningful degree. Again we saw something similar with the 2008 bank bailouts and the HAMP and HARP programs, I worked for a law firm briefly that tried to help people and we did to an extent, but for the most part maybe 80% it was banks saying you didn’t submit the paper work, we don’t have it, for months while simultaneously forging ahead in foreclosure cases often with fraudulent documents. To this day politicians champion those programs pointing to a return of the loans with interest, not once addressing the very real systemic problems, fraud and human costs.
I think they certainly aren’t perfect and this isn’t meant as an absolute measure, but an estimate. So it’s the best measure we have compared to everything else.
Perhaps we should ignore it because it is worse than nothing. But if you read through the methods you’ll see that they plan for the issues you bring up as they are typical for phone surveys.
Also, if we’re just pitching narrative, I expect job seekers to be more likely to be responding to phone and email since they are waiting on interviews to contact them back.
What about the 20 million working age on social security? Not counted.
21% of Americans are on means-tested public assistance, which, by definition, requires lack of sustainable employment. Not counted.
A huge number of students can’t find a job. Not counted.
Not that ‘employment’ is a meaningful measure of a society’s desirability.
The U3 number is trying to measure how much of the total workforce is able to find work. If I can’t or don’t want to work, I’m not part of the workforce.
It’s not that unemployment rate is a measure of “desire ability” (whatever that means) but as a measure of how much labor is available and can work. It’s a useful economic measure, but not an absolute one.
If yes, then it truly is brag-worthy.
I know that sounds funky, but the reason why they don't want your minimum wage job is then they lose the benefits (not just money, but things like food stamps, etc.). If they didn't lose their benefits, they'd work to gain some extra cash in addition to them.
This is just cruel.
Article title: Report: Walmart Workers Cost Taxpayers $6.2 Billion In Public Assistance
Spoke to someone just recently who said they’ll stay on unemployment as long as they are allowed because they haven’t had to work in over a year and get to spend their time playing their favorite video games.
Which, if you make as much unemployed as you do employed, it makes no sense to return to work. He’s not a bad person. He’s just optimizing.
Personally, I'd rather have people dicking around, hunting and playing video games and having fun, rather than working at a soul-sucking mimimum-wage job and still be on the state's teat (getting food stamps) because the minimim wage is too low.
I prefer having people on the dole if they are productive rather than sitting at home entertaining themselves at my expense. There is no societal upside to that.
It's anecdotal, sure. I would love to see some studies on it or even just data.
>contribute
I think you need to consider how screwed by outsourcing and immigration working class Americans have been for the past 30 years.
But nah, just force people to accept shit wages.
$7.50 / hour is a pittance.
This is what the point of a social safety net is. If you can't work, you get a pittance, but enough to live on. And if nobody around wants to pay you enough to live on, you don't have to take their starvation wages.
If you use https://uid.dli.mt.gov/claimants/benefits-estimator to estimate your benefit for $40k/yr ($10k/qtr) you get $400/week, so with the extra PUA program it's $700/week.
$400/week is $10/hour. $700/week is $17.50/hour.
At 40 hours/week, $17.50/hour is $36,400 for 52 weeks. It's arguably more than a pittance, but it's only 1.3x the federal poverty level for a family of 4. It also effectively sets a $17.50 price floor on labor for anyone who is eligible for the PUA program.
I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing. Employers would have to raise wages and raise prices a bit to compensate. I have seen a handful of papers with evidence that price increases are generally a lot smaller than minimum wage increases, so I'm not worried about it just turning into inflation. But I am not an economist so I don't want to make claims that I can't back up.
Why? Because lower-price restaurants would have a choice: dramatically raise their food prices (which would almost certainly drive inflation across the board as everyone in all industries would hopefully see raises to deal with increased costs of living) or try to minimize the hit. If the latter, this would set off an immediate price war, even if unintentional, because McDonald's especially would strive to keep their prices from changing as little as possible.
Then, the smaller chains that couldn't afford to reduce their workforce and/or invest in efficiency or robotics wouldn't survive. You would see less competitive chains like Popeye's closing up on Interstate exits, and their marketshare would be handed over to the larger chains.
The unintended consequences of a massive shift like that would be enormous, and it would absolutely result in a stronger national chains and probably destroy or badly harm local eateries -- especially the ones that were trying to be price competitive. Get ready to see your local small businesses under severe pressure, while profitable operations like McDonald's and Chik-Fil-A will mop up the smaller places, and this is across the board at any low-skill, low-wage places, not just restaurants.
I don't know what they are, but it isn't 100%, which is what it would take to require doubling prices to cover doubled wages.
Edit: Incremental revenue? Okay, that it would double, but so what?
two, I love how you're carrying water and claiming they'd need to raise prices by 100% to cover a higher wage, when the CEO doesn't have share concern.
https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/mcdonalds-ceo-chain-will...
and three in Australia where the minimum wage is nearly $20 an hour, the food prices are only a little higher.
https://www.aussieprices.com.au/mcdonalds-prices/
so your concern is proven by the CEO of the company and reality to be nonsense.
Since 1997, the federal minimum wage has gone up by 40%. Over that same time period the cost of a Big Mac has gone up by 100%.
Perhaps the relationship between minimum wage and fast food prices isn’t linear.
In addition, the federal nature of the US means that we’ve had lots of different trials, and the results are that your expected result doesn’t happen in states with higher minimum wages, but only by a small amount. In addition, a whole body of scientific research has found that your expected effect doesn’t happen.
Minimum wage history from https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart. Big Mac prices from https://www.eatthis.com/big-mac-cost/ with some interpolation to match the years that the minimum wage changed.
https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index
Note there are high safety net nations both above and below the US cost of Big mac, which signals that maybe something else is afoot there. But certainly there is enough variation to dispel that unemployment benefits are correlated the cost of the big mac.
That's sort of the point of productivity improvements. You either invest capital or you die.
Exactly why should poor people prop up poor businesses with low capital depth because "what about the jobs"?
Kalecki warned about this as far back as 1943.
https://mronline.org/2010/05/22/political-aspects-of-full-em...
Given that McDonald's makes approximately $10B in profit per year [1], I think everyone up the chain will still be able to keep their mansions and multiple homes if it only makes a couple of billion in profit each year.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros...
I knew I remembered this. There was a damn "labor shortage" in Montana before the pandemic.
Or is this really just about punishing those who can't fight back as hard? Probably.
Edit: unemployed people are easy targets in order to appear tough in politics. Its great for later campaigning.
Anger management course. Community service of 40 hours.
And some other issues on top, including some bending of the truth? Wow. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/17/greg-gianfor...
Yes there are side effects to that (raising prices is one), but anything else is pushing a problem forward.
What even more hilarious is, they are offering $200 sign on bonuses to work in their restaurant. Meanwhile Wawa (a gas station chain) is offering $500 bonus + 1 day PTO when you get your vaccine AND $75 to get your vaccine.
Gee I wonder why someone isn't signing up to a $200 bonus to get paid hopefully $8 an hour after tips!
otoh, in the context where you do not feel like you can count on keeping the job, then bonuses become more appealing than incremental wage increases.
/s
That's what inflation is for. The problem is that the minimum wage should increase with inflation. Inflation is best used to lower the pay of the higher paid, not the borderline (for which there's no savings because of resultant increases in crime and the need to supplement low pay with transfer payments - which is just subsidy of private industry.)
Sure, I love to write code. But I want to write the code that gives the joy. Not the code that some client wants me to write.
That being said, ending the unemployment benefits is the right move.It's not sustainable. I worry greatly that we're entering a time when the government is going to become our dad/mom and we don't have to work.
But then, where will the money come from??? We can only tax the rich so much.
Unfortunately, that's exactly the goal for too many people anymore.
The real question is, how many of these driven people do we actually need, and what are the proper ways to let work with the other people.
The other 80% would work for them. The 80/20 rule in principle.
Yes, sounds bad, but that the world that we live in.
Okay, let’s hear the proportions then. We’re talking about unemployment in Montana.
“Different papers have established that the extra $600 in benefits distributed earlier in the pandemic had limited labor supply effects and likely didn’t disincentivize work, including one by the National Bureau of Economic Research and another by Yale University. The current supplemental benefit is worth half of what those papers reviewed.”
Yeah that’s pretty much exactly why they reduced unemployment benefits. You seriously think it’s a good idea to pay people more to do nothing than they would get for their best option for doing something useful for somebody else?
You know the money comes from other people, right? Other people that work. And if they refuse to pay, they get arrested, and if they refuse arrest, they get shot. So, given that the potential punishment for work includes death, why would anybody do that?
I mean, somebody has to, right?
Nah, please consider re-reading my comment in its entirety. The comment that I’m replying to is taking a sentence out of context, creating a straw man out of it, and then attacking it.
> You know the money comes from other people, right?
Yeah, definitely
> And if they refuse to pay, they get arrested, and if they refuse arrest, they get shot. So, given that the potential punishment for work includes death, why would anybody do that?
Bit of a slippery slope (tax evasion, in the US, usually doesn’t lead to death at the hands of law enforcement) but yea, I agree with the sentiment here. Avoiding arrest is good (barring any justified civil disobedience)
If you want real results, just make being unemployed illegal.
No need to increase salaries... so is perfect!
Having all the free time in the world is no use if you still can't afford to eat or put a roof over your family.
With federal covid aid that would have gone up to $567 - close to California minimum wage, but just short of it.
I welcome you to try to pay rent/mortgage + afford food with that much money.
At that point it makes more sense to just give money to individuals directly so that they can spend the money on actually productive companies.
$266B went to unemployment and $377B to small businesses, of course the law makers were going to end the program and force people back into low paying jobs with no alternative to put food on the table and keep a roof over their head.
Biden said all along he lead the last economic recovery, and he did...on paper. Following 2008 he helped devise a system of removing people from the unemployment numbers once their benefits expired and even though many never returned to work they were swept under the rug and poof 5% unemployment.
That’s what this is, and you can be sure Montana will be championing the policy and highlighting record levels of unemployment, but the reality is those “lucky” enough to get a job will return to a shit job, living paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford a $400 emergency expense (as was the case pre-pandemic) and record numbers of people will be written off as if they never existed.
It sounds like a tinfoil conspiracy theory, but it’s something we saw in 2008 and already seen multiple times policy decisions during the pandemic. Meanwhile the people will continue to point the fingers at one another and debate in forums like this, not realizing or simply unable to accept the suffering in this dystopia. #Dogetothemoon
I can believe that unemployment numbers are easy to game and that politicians mess with them in a non productive way.
It's not a serious number. The only number that counts is the prime-age employment rate.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060
The stupid thing that Biden (and Obama) brag about is having the longest recovery in history. What that really means is the slowest revovery in history. You can't say that the Dems didn't learn their lesson, though - the money spigot is turned on this time, and if they pull it off the economy after the pandemic will be better than the one before it.
My point is not that minimum wage is bad, but rather, redistribution of wealth is necessary.
Violently, inefficiently and unfairly, but all of it. Where do you think the support for communism came from in early XX century?
I can barely afford my house and car, which middle class people of 50 years ago had no issues affording.
Aren't there many more people out there making 50M a year who should be targeted before I am targeted?
Wealth redistribution to support poor people would be taken from businesses. This is a typical social welfare model.
Mcdonalds cook - $40k/yr
Senior Dev - $130k/yr
CEO - $180K/yr
I don't know how something like this could be implemented, but we are on a fast track to 95% of wages going to 5% of workers.
Really? Based on what data?
The US Census Bureau has data on the aggregate share of income in Table H-2. For 2019, the top 5% of households received 23.0% of aggregate income (a bit lower than 2018 and 2017).
Looking back 25 years before that to 1994, that number was 21.2% and (eyeballing it) seems to have been fairly range-bound in the 20-23% range since the early 1990s.
The data starts in 1967, where that number was 17.2%.
Edit: Growing up in the poor part of my country, I could see that first-hand: The father of my friend had a small shop and had a revenue spike every month, the same day every month. It was the day after unemployment benefits landed on people's bank accounts.
The concept of a "free market" belongs with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It's not something a rational adult should ever admit to believing in.
Remember this next time the financial industry demands a bail-out or a major military project goes ridiculously over budget, and everyone pretends to be shocked and surprised.
Artificial floor? This is literally a mechanism in place that adds more money into the economy. You can complain about the tax burden of unemployment insurance but that's not what I am seeing in your comment.
Seriously what the hell am I reading here? This is literally the free market in action, if you don't see it then your definition of free market only includes a market that only benefits yourself.
The minimum wage is crap because it is a price control. It prevents market signals from working. No additional money is being added into the economy, there is no guarantee that you find employment, it is literally a ban on work.
However, unemployment is not that, it is a defacto jobs guarantee except the job in question is merely seeking a job. The reason why job guarantees work is that they create additional money that drives inflation beyond the point where the job guarantee is necessary.
If the job guarantee is set at $1500, then inflation will rise until the private sector can afford to pay everyone $1500 or more.
This isn't a big vs small business debate - small places don't always pay crap wages, and some big places do pay crap wages.
Sidenote: A lot of fast food places are franchises, and a franchise might just have one or two. They aren't in any better position than a family-owned fast food place in a small town.
If you cannot pay your employees a living wage, you should not run a business.
> Starting June 27, Montanans will lose access to the extra $300 in weekly unemployment benefits, but maintain their regular benefits.
So my calculus is “Would I rather make $300/week for zero hours worked or $600/week for 40 hours worked?”
So it’s not just a more money question, but a money vs time issue. It seems rational to me to prefer less money for no work. The problem is that it’s not sustainable as we’re adding debt to pay for it in the short term. This seemed important when work was impossible due to COVID, but now that we’re recovering it’s again possible to work.
Is there was a sustainable UBI plan to keep paying for this in the long term, that would be nice.
This is not a wages problem. This is a huge influx of wealthy people to the state that aren't working but are taking up property and services problem.
Even the exorbitant sounding $17 an hour isn’t much of a living wage in Bozeman anymore. Hasn’t been for a decade or more.
Also housing prices are astronomical, but your numbers are a touch high. I believe the median home price is $600k or so.
Cost of living isn't just "buying a house". It's housing, transportation, clothing, food, etc.
> your numbers are a touch high.
Nope. I just got a flier that mentioned that the average home price for a townhouse in Belgrade (a "suburb" of Bozeman (which itself only has roughly a 50k population), for those not local) is $765k.
"Entry wage" is a misnomer for jobs like that. There's no advancement at a job like that except to management, and there will always be an order of magnitude fewer managers than workers (and far less turnover.)
And skilled trades... they've been devalued as well. The average salary for a welder is in the $17/$18 range across America††. Not really better than McD's (in this thread of conversation at least).
† https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/average-sala...
†† https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/welding-jobs...
What drives those prices?
And real estate investment groups buying up housing to rent.
I don't know about Montana but in my state I pay state income taxes, county and city property taxes, and state, county, city sales taxes.
Try paying them $600 per week. If they see you pay enough for them to afford rent (which is not possible with $300 week) you will have the better offer.
It is quite possible to pay rent if you make $300 a week in parts of this country. That is why the $15/hour nationally is dumb. Let the locals pick their number for their area.
Edit: How does the more productive company survive? Well, there is a "company" down the street creating customers who have $300 per week to spend on things they actually need.
Why raise wages if you can force people to choose between starvation and working two jobs until they break of old age or die of a very likely preventable disease that they could not afford to diagnose and/or treat?
A minimum wage is below housing wage in every single state in US. https://www.businessinsider.com/minimum-wage-worker-cant-aff...
Well they obviously got what they deserved from not working hard enough. Must have not been told about bootstraps
/s
Then, it's we're entitled to all the cheap labor we require.
https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/139001107417964544...
>Most of these restaurant and retail owners can clearly pay more if they want but they are worried about the precedent and they know if they ban together and whine to a compliant media enough and fake like people won’t get cheeseburgers politicians will pull UI and social programs
https://twitter.com/adamjohnsonNYC/status/139001943881718579...
>Here we detail the long history of industry trade groups in nursing, education, trucking, construction & dozens of industries shaping media narratives of “worker shortages”. covid just supercharged this decades old PR gambit with an added kicker of pressuring govt to suspend UI
I think you're extremely off the mark with this comment.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/montana-governor-ends-e...
>In towns like Bozeman, where costs of housing have skyrocketed during the pandemic, workers “are not getting jobs because these jobs don't pay enough to pay their bills,” McWilliams said.
Single family houses on the outskirts of town are selling for upwards of $800k. Condos anywhere from $400k to $1M. Apartments are going for $1,500 a month. Your Athieta (a somewhat high end clothing store, also worth noting) employee is barely making double what's needed to just afford an apartment.