And what did you think would happen if you blindly paid people to not look for work? The Biden administration does not seem to understand basic behavioral economics.
> .. as soon as the very generous unemployment came out she had dozens of people quitting. A lot of people prefer unemployment to menial jobs.
This comment:
> ...after last March they furloughed (laid off? not sure) a lot of people that they subsequently couldn't get to come back
Did it not occur to you that your statements are entirely contradictory? What actually happened here? Did people quit to get that sweet, sweet government lucre or were they "furloughed" ("no, we're not firing you, we're just not going to pay you or give you work for an indefinite period") and then decide that, gee, maybe they didn't want to come back to work for a company that kicked them to the curb the second things got tough?
See the answer to “My employer has remained open because it is essential. I’m not sick, nor is anyone in my household sick. I do not have children or care for someone who cannot care for themselves. However, I’m afraid of getting coronavirus from customers coming to the store, so I quit and filed for unemployment. Can I obtain benefits under the CARES Act?”
I don't have actual data, which is obviously not a great position to be in, in a discussion, but I saw a TON of stories from restaurant owners who could not open solely because all the employees left since they made better money by not working.
I’ve seen restaurant owners saying they can’t hire people, I haven’t seen restaurant owners saying people quit for unemployment. If it’s the case that the restaurant furloughed or laid off people I don’t see why they expect the state to intervene to help them. Socialism for me, but not for thee?
It's work in a hot environment where you have to wear pretty significant PPE all day. Very uncomfortable, manual labor.
From what I see around me there a huge number of unfilled jobs because people are making more money from unemployment than from jobs.
Yes, the job could pay more, but that has its own set of pros and cons. It's almost acting like a backdoor minimum wage, but worse, because some people would rather make a bit less and not work at all. (I'm not saying that's you - I'm talking in generalities here.)
If the extra unemployment benefits from the CARES Act was just changing the unemployment pay to 100% your prior pay, it wouldn’t’ve been as big an issue. But for someone making $300 a week could possibly get $800 through unemployment (~$200 for unemployment plus $600 “bonus”).
The CARES Act suspending the “search for work” requirement didn’t help either. It was necessary at the time as there were no jobs available, but I think it is definitely time to reevaluate that. It encourages people to not go back when the business opens up because they’ll not only have to go back to work, but they’ll be making less.
It takes a one mutation to make current vaccines ineffective. We also don't know how long immunity will last. If it's only a year or two then without eradicating everywhere it won't go away in the US either.
Also, IIRC the CARES Act suspended the requirement to look for more work if you've been furloughed/laid off. A friend of mine who works in a restaurant was getting paid more to go surf at the beach than he used to get paid to go to work. When his employer opened up, my friend was understandably not motivated to get scheduled for very many shifts.
USA is still #3 in the world for cases per day.
Countries with slightly fewer cases than USA (Turkey, France, Germany) all have MUCH smaller populations so it doesn't make sense to say they're doing "better"
>Would it be better to point out that just under a 1000 people a day are still dying from it in the US?
No, any sort of absolute count is going to be equally misleading. For example my city had 5 covid deaths yesterday. Does that mean that we're 200x safer than the rest of the US? Of course not, it just means that you're comparing two populations of different size.
>What's the better metric?
Anything that's normalized by population size. For example per capita new cases or per capita deaths.
The question was rhetorical. There is no better metric for showing the pandemic is still on going. If you have 50k cases a day, and 1000 deaths a day, it doesn't matter if other countries are lower or higher, it's clearly on going.
How many deaths per day would you use as a threshold for being past the middle of the pandemic?
> A bright spot: The labor force grew significantly, a counterpoint to the narrative that generous unemployment checks are keeping Americans out of the workforce.