The Labor Department recently reported there are now a record 10.9 million job openings in America. That’s twice the size of the entire Ohio labor force.
Yet the Labor Department also has counted some 8 million unemployed people. So what in the world is going on here? Why aren’t the 8 million workers allegedly looking for jobs filling any of the 10.9 million open positions? Could it be they aren’t looking very hard?
Job growth fell by more than half in August, partly because of COVID-19 concerns and the delta variant. But there is a lot more going on here.
Government welfare policies are clearly keeping Americans, millions of them, from taking jobs. Even though there are millions of retail and restaurant jobs open, these industries lost employment in August. Same for construction, with a loss of jobs even though nearly every construction company in America is desperate for workers. The same is true for unfilled warehousing, manufacturing, trucking, engineering, and business services jobs. These aren’t “dead-end” or even minimum wage jobs in most cases. Open factory and truck driver jobs pay $50,000 to $100,000 a year with benefits.
But economist Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago has found that when counting all government benefits, a family of four in states with high welfare benefits, such as New York and Connecticut, with two unemployed parents can receive up to $100,000 in cash, food stamps, and more.
Why work? In some cases, workers would see a cut in their income if they returned to their jobs.
Former Trump economic adviser Larry Kudlow noted that President Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress have “done away with the successful bipartisan welfare reforms of the 1990s. Those required work.” They also had time limits of about 26 weeks. As a result, we now have people who have been collecting unemployment benefits and other government payments for 18 months.
Now, it is almost as if Washington is intentionally discouraging work — even though COVID-19’s worst is behind us. Biden recently recommended that states with high unemployment rates, including New York and New Jersey, continue to extend bonus unemployment benefits past the Labor Day deadline. He also increased food stamps by 25%.
There is another problem facing employers and workers. Inflation is running ahead of wages. So even though wages are up 4%, the cost of living is up more than 5%. Workers’ paychecks are shrinking as massive government borrowing and the multitrillion-dollar money printing to fund the spending stampede in Washington send the price tags higher on everything from gas to hamburgers to airline tickets every week.
The other victims of this anti-work federal policy are the 10 million-plus men and women who operate small businesses. Bloomberg reported that half of all small businesses are hiring and have multiple job openings. Some are even hiring workers who can’t pass drug tests, and they are so desperate for workers. Biden said these businesses need to “pay workers more.” Easier said than done. Many mom-and-pop firms can’t afford to pay the wages of the big-box stores or the large corporations. Their profit margins are already razor-thin.
Biden said the solution to the jobs problem is to pass his $4.5 trillion debt bill and $2 trillion tax hike. Unfortunately, this would only raise the taxes on those who are working, fan the flames of inflation, and pass trillions of dollars of more costs on to our children. And despite his promises, most of the bill’s spending has nothing to do with job creation.
For years, conservatives and even many liberal Democrats advocated a policy of “make work pay.” Now we have a de facto federal and state policy of “make sitting on the couch pay.” The extra $300 per week in unemployment benefits ended on Labor Day. Let’s hope this gets workers back in the workforce to earn a paycheck rather than being handed a welfare payment.
