When you spend your whole life in government, as President Joe Biden, has, it’s easy not to understand how economics, business, or the free market work.
Which is why a New York Post report is disturbing.
The Biden administration has been in denial about the effect of its supposed COVID-19 relief bills.
Biden himself this week denied during comments made at the White House that people were avoiding work because the virus-related unemployment benefits he promotes are too generous.
Yet he also reminded workers receiving those benefits that federal law requires them to forfeit the payments if they decline to take a “suitable” job.
“We’re going to make it clear that anyone collecting unemployment, who was offered a suitable job, must take the job or lose their unemployment benefits,” Biden said.
“No one should be allowed to game the system,” he added.
Then, he ridiculously said: “We don’t see much evidence of that.”
Which is it? Either there was sufficient reason to remind people they must take jobs. Or it’s not happening.
Clarity, consistency and candor are not hallmarks of the current administration.
But the president at that moment added, “My expectation is that as our economy comes back, these companies will provide fair wages and safe work environments. And if they do, they’ll find plenty of workers.”
Yes, but business owners likely didn’t believe they would have to compete against .., the White House.
On Friday, the New York Post reported that the White House “urged businesses struggling to find workers willing to come off unemployment to raise their pay to compete with a $300 per week federal unemployment insurance supplement.”
“A top economic adviser to President Biden said that competing against the government subsidies was a matter for the free market to resolve,” the Post continued.
“The way that in our capitalist system — so the way that a market economy works is we work through prices as a signal,” Cecilia Rouse, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said, according to the Post.
“Especially essential workers, their jobs are not risk-free, right? They’ve become a little more — a little riskier. And so if employers have to pay a little bit more to compensate those employees to take on that risk, I think that’s appropriate — again in a market economy, where that’s the currency.”
The Post noted that White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki also chimed in.
“Many of these companies — big companies, let me say — who benefited, many of them made quite a profit during the pandemic and many of them also received quite a bit of benefits, $1.4 trillion worth — could pay, could offer to pay a little bit more, and maybe that will incentivize more workers to come back into the workforce.”
So that thing Biden could not find “much evidence” of happening is actually being created and perpetuated by his own administration: they’re acknowledging that companies should outbid the government and its taxpayer-funded checks to get people back to work.
Republican-led states are not taking this.
The Free Press recently noted that at least seven GOP governors have said in the past week they will withdraw from the federal government’s unemployment program in order to encourage people to get back to work.
Back when America was still a capitalist country it was other companies that drove up the price of labor during a tight labor market. But in the Biden-socialist model, taxpayers are the ones responsible for that, by paying “workers” not to work.
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