Two out of three Americans earned more from the combination of unemployment benefits and the $600 supplemental economic stimulus checks than they did at the jobs that they lost. How do you feel about that factoid? It may determine what kind of person or animal you are.
Which Political Animal Are You?
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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That’s the way the capitalist pigs think.
They think the old people should take a bullet for the economy:
“No one reached out to me and said, ‘as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?’” Patrick said. “And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
And old people should die if it means conserving the old American economy by opening up the vulnerable to deadly COVID-19 infections so that young people can be happy and go back to work for a lower income than unemployment provides.
Protest this and they’ll restore order even at the cost of killing a few who dissent.
So it’s the old “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” scam.
These assholes have to come up with a better offer.
Black people couldn’t find mutual solidarity with the White Occupy Wall Street people despite robo-signings that resulted in a great loss of Black wealth under Obama’s “cure” for the results of White Wall Street Fraud.
Wait until millions of people have been evicted from their millions of homes and White people find great solidarity with Black people on more than opposition to police Black genocide.
Trump is Making America Great Again, not in the way he intended, but in the way I predicted.
When there’s no democracy in elections people will have to find it in the streets.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/03/24/covid-19-texas-official-suggests-elderly-willing-die-economy/2905990001/
Those “$600 supplemental economic stimulus checks” were a one-time deal, so those “layabouts” will be back to expiring unemployment benefits, IF they ever got any. They will soon find, if they haven’t already, that they’re permanently unemployed … and permanently homeless.
This IS truly exceptional!!!
It is looking more and more like we’ll soon have 28 million newly homeless. Do the Congresscritters all figure this will disenfranchise more of the other party? Voters will probably blame the GOP, giving Biden the House and Senate. And there are two chances Biden will then take swift, strong action to get those 28 million re-housed: slim, and none.
I agree with the gist of this, Ted, but there still is something wrong with the combination of that extra 600 for people who’ve just lost jobs with the total lack of support for the long-term unemployed who weren’t laid off recently and (I think this is right) for people who have multiple jobs and get laid off from one or more of them. Wouldn’t it be better to have aid go to the people who need it most?
I hate to admit it, Ted, but your third frame above forces me to confess my membership in H sapiens sapiens….
Henri
Signs point to … blowback. I’m sure there’s a Latin phrase for this phenomenon. The, um, Biden campaign is engaging in a series of steps that all the bloviators and bloviatrices are praising now but that, after the loss in November/January, will be picked apart by the same blovs as the stupidest possible things that could have been done.
One, Biden staying in his basement and not engaging with crowds to whatever extent possible, even if just remotely.
Two, Biden/the dnc not getting out the vote. Trump/the RNC is outpacing the dems in voter registrations.
Three, Biden not addressing, actively, the issue of his rumored cognitive decline, especially as exhibited by his refusal to go on Chris Wallace’s talk show for an interview.
Four, Biden’s national poll average lead (7.4 points) is larger than where Clinton was at this point in 2016 (5.9 points), but not by much considering how disliked Trump is.
Five, the upcoming wave of evictions/foreclosures. No one seems to be looking at it like the voter will. Obama cheerfully threw millions of people away in the 2007 housing bubble. You got 99 weeks of unemployment. What? You still don’t have a job? That’s not my problem. That the Republicans are trying something similar now, and the dems are ineffective? Even when the dems were “effective” they were useless. The voters don’t remember much, but they remember burning through their meager 401(k)s and losing their homes.
Six, the mainstream media’s continuous cheerleading about Biden doing fine (the Times just ran an opinion piece that amounts to something right out of the astrology department. The “everything is awesome, nothing to see here” rictus is so obvious I can’t believe they’re still trying to carry it off.
Seven, remember how Hillary won all those black voters in the Rust Belt in the primary that she rigged? And then those states’ Electoral College votes went to the Republicans? Yeah, Biden’s black voters, after nearly six months of George Floyd protests and mostly crickets from the Biden camp? They just might decide to sit this one out, even if Obama hand-picked Biden.
Taking all of it together, not even adding in the usual Republican trickery disenfranchising voters, Biden’s handlers just could manage to lose this election. I look forward to everyone on the left trying to rewrite history when it happens. “No one could have predicted …”