This letter comes to you from Maine rather than, as normal, from Washington, D.C. Examining the entrails of federal policy is easier in the imperial city, but one can see better from outside the Beltway how it fails.
© Provided by Washington Examiner LetterEditor.jpg What stands out is the Democrats’ corrosive policy of paying people not to work. Like much of the country, Maine is booming and businesses want to hire. In May, the unemployment rate fell to 4.7%, better than the national rate of 5.8%.
But the number is deceptive. Labor force participation fell to 60.1%, slightly worse than the national rate of 60.2%, which itself is below anything since the 1970s. Maine’s participation rate has fallen nearly a point in the year since COVID-19 threw millions out of work. This flatters the unemployment rate because only people looking for jobs are counted, not those who choose to be idle. Young graduates are lolling on the dole from Uncle Sam rather than taking summer jobs before knuckling down to careers in the fall. Some arranged to collect COVID-enhanced unemployment benefits a year ago, cutting a deal to be fired by their employers so taxpayers would foot the bill for what was effectively their severance.
Everywhere one looks, it’s impossible to recruit staff. A local grocery has posted a notice asking customers to be patient with slow service because the place is short-staffed. A builder who’d like to take on more projects amid the real estate boom is frustrated because he “can’t hire people to do the work.” The local YMCA has lost 30 lifeguards because it can’t keep them on the wages it can pay. A lodge catering to whitewater rafting groups on the Kennebec River turns customers away because its diminished staff can’t cope. In its restaurant, tables are left uncleared around other diners because it’s impossible to hire busboys to tidy up. The frazzled manager says bluntly that his inability to match what Joe Biden pays people to stay idle “has something to do with it.” A hostess in another understaffed restaurant put the issue with succinct completeness, saying, “Until the unemployment runs out, no one wants to work.”
Paying people not to work saps morale, slows wealth creation, and becomes a habit of idleness — a malaise even. Does anyone think this is good for the country? Why would one persist in such folly when evidence abounds of the harm it does and the good it thwarts? It’s almost as if the Democrats want not only a torpid public dependent on central government but also actively want America to fail — which is the theme of our cover story by Peter Savodnik (P.xv).
Here’s a chicken and egg question about which came first. Was it the Left’s wish for American failure and thence its adoption of a deleterious ideology of government interference? Or was it an ideological antipathy to freedom and thus its tenacious embrace of policies that don’t work? Sadly, the answer appears to be that it’s a lot of both.
well written - good Sir - just another of the fascist DPST methods of subversion of representative democracy - copied from Hitler'sand Stalin - and AOC's re-education camps wait in the wings for the unwary to the reality of fascist DPST marxist revolutionary aims.
