Donald Trumpās administration is threatening to withdraw federal funding for unemployment assistance in all 50 states as part of the presidentās nationwide campaign against āfraudā in government spending.
In a letter to the governors of 53 states and territories, acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling warned that the federal government would use āevery available toolā to combat āwaste, fraud and abuseā within state-run unemployment insurance programs, including āwithholding administrative funds from statesā for the first time in history.
There is no single national program for unemployment support, though the federal government partners with state agencies to support temporary financial assistance to out-of-work Americans. Nearly 2 million people are currently receiving those benefits, while roughly 229,000 people are filing initial jobless claims every week, according to the Labor Department.
Unemployment insurance claims arenāt used to measure the unemployment rate in the US. But I wouldnāt be surprised if Trump thinks they areā¦ Nor would I be surprised if he tries (or is trying) to change the measure so that it is based on unemployment claims.
To be clear Iām not saying the USās unemployment numbers are goodāthey are distorted to make the unemployment number look smaller than it is. One issue is that People must be actively looking for work to be considered āunemployedā, otherwise they arenāt part of the ālabor forceā and donāt count at all. It doesnāt matter if they are capable of work, want to work, and spent a year straight looking for work; if they arenāt actively looking now, they donāt count. Additionally, if a person is doing any work at allāeven a few hours a week at minimum wage, or doing a bit of unpaid work for a family businessāthey are considered an employed member of the labor force. It doesnāt matter if they are broke, homeless, and desperately looking for a job; they count as an employed member of the labor force.
Interesting, but yeah I guess that still counts in the sense that still itās pushing say, software engineers that lost their jobs to AI, to absolutely have to take a minimum wage job to, possibly afford enough food to survive while getting evicted/foreclosed etcā¦
No matter how you slice it, it still does put more peopleā¦ into a rush to get SOME form of employment. even at the cost of their time that they could be using to getā¦ actually livable employment.
blue collar worker looks up
āHomie, you think we have jobs for yāall?ā
Thereās a republican solution for that as wellā¦ ālower/eliminate minimum wage so corporations can hire people to do things that are less usefulā. Think of it, we can pay people $2 an hour to have them stand in a park and tell people they should eat at mcdonalds, normally the conversion rate is too low, but at $2 an hour, if they can get one person to go every 2 hours, itās still profitable.
(and yes obviously this is horribly terrifyingly stupidā¦ and honestly not that far from what many horrible politicians have pushed for).