Unemployed People Need More Stress
Are unemployment insurance payments too high? Many business owners seem to think so. By coincidence, Republicans agree with them. They believe the federal unemployment supplement is too generous and discourages workers from returning to their poorly paid, unsafe, sub-minimum wage jobs.
On the other hand, many Democrats, liberals, unemployed people and other interest groups want the supplemental payments to continue all the way to September! They seem to think that the purpose of unemployment insurance is to provide a safety net for people who are out of work.
They are, of course, wrong. Any cursory examination of the system will show that the purpose of unemployment insurance is to create stress in unemployed workers.
It may be hard to remember, but in normal times, that is, when we’re not experiencing a once-in-a-lifetime worldwide pandemic and a twice-in-a-lifetime worldwide economic crisis, unemployment benefits are set to a fraction of what a worker was making until they were laid off. In other words, the system makes sure that the unemployed don’t receive enough money to pay their bills. The purpose of this is obviously to create stress in the unemployed, that is, on top of the stress they already feel because, they’re, you know, unemployed.
We believe this stress is necessary, that it build character and prevents laziness. We believe this in spite of the fact that you can’t collect unemployment insurance if you quit your job or were fired for cause. You only qualify if you’re someone who was laid off, as Joe Biden likes to say, “through no fault of their own.” (It’s strange that we never talk about people who, for example, own companies “through no fault of their own,” but let’s not get into that right now.)
We believe this extra stress is necessary despite the fact that every week when you log on to certify for your weekly unemployment benefit, there’s a counter that tells you how many weeks you have left, and that counter never goes up! It only goes down, ticking off the remaining time until you have no benefits at all. That counter does, it must be admitted, induce a certain amount of stress, but clearly not enough.
Unemployment benefits must be set low because of the basic economic principle of supply and demand, which can be expressed thusly: Working people must be driven back to work by the fear of hunger and homelessness.
That is why, under no circumstances, must unemployed workers be given enough money to pay their bills. They must, at no time, be allowed to have enough money to live on. Anything else leads to indolence, getting enough sleep, the writing of screenplays and other irresponsible behavior.
On the other hand, and this is equally important, when working people do go back to work, they must, under no circumstances, be given enough money to live on! They must not receive a wage that allows them to pay their bills. That’s because working people must not be allowed to develop an exaggerated sense of their value in the marketplace.
High school graduates who think they deserve fifteen dollars an hour? Waiters who think they shouldn’t have to live on tips? Those kinds of extremist Venezuelan/Danish, socialist ideas must be nipped in the bud, stamped out before they take root and spread.
So, to recap, when working people are unemployed, they must, under no circumstances, be allowed to have enough money to live on, and furthermore, when working people are employed, they must, under no circumstances, be allowed to have enough money to live on.
Rich people, however, are different. While working people must be driven back to work by the fear of hunger and homelessness, the wealthy can only be convinced to make more money by being given the opportunity to make more money. Therefore, rich people must be enticed to work with the promise of limitless, untaxed wealth. Anything less would destroy their work ethic. They would no longer see the point of going to their corner offices and looking at their spreadsheets. And, without wealthy men sitting in their offices, looking at speadsheets, the economy would collapse. (I explained some of this previously in, “Tax the Rich, Just Don’t Tell Them.”)
The fact that these arguments sound like something Maggie Smith’s character would have said on Downton Abbey does not in any way reduce their validity, or their appeal to modern conservatives. Some ideas are timeless. The peasants must be whipped into the fields, and their children must not be educated because it would give them ambitions above their station. Different rules apply to the aristocracy, which today apparently includes 19-year-old high school dropouts who sell killer apps to Google. Only the wealthy understand wealth and we must not obstruct their untrammeled access to it.
Luckily, even most Democrats and their Venezuelan/ Swedish masters understand that there must be a limit to the stress-free vacation currently enjoyed by the working poor. Come September, unemployment insurance will be restored to its true purpose of inducing fear and anxiety in those who receive it. We can only hope that it’s not too late, that after a year or more of being able to pay their bills with a little left over at the end of the week, working people may not easily forget what that feels like.
After all, they may have gotten used to it.
