US weekly jobless claims jump to 6.6m, double the previous record (3.3m) from last week
- Thread starter RoKKeR
- Start date
When you hold everything up by popsicle sticks with the majority of the country living paycheck to paycheck, it was only a matter of time. Trump showed us not just that the government was shit and based on "gentlemen's agreements" but that our country is fucked nearly beyond repair.
We need a new fucking deal immediately.
I'm unemployed and want nothing to do with a new job. Why? So I can go out, get infected and bring that home to my family? Not worth it. I'll ride this out at home.
BS.
Trump made concrete moves like killing the pandemic response team, calling the virus a hoax, fighting with Governors like a child and so on.
I'm in Germany where we did at least a bit more to take precautions. Didn't stop businesses to start firing people like mad though.
It's 600 on top of already established benefits.
Essentially translates to 900 a week for am average worker, or roughly 3600 a month.
Hopefully something good will come out of this...like the widespread rejection of traditional conservative/free market dogma that has been guiding almost all US policy for 40 years.
I feel it's pretty likely it at least gets extended once more for a few more months.
Businesses would lose business regardless, especially in in- and export. This is a global pandemic, and the bullshit Trump is pulling has little bearing on how businesses react to this sort of thing. Their revenue is fucked anyway, so they would start letting people go anyway, too.
Unemployment is going up everywhere, even in countries that reacted better to this mess. Businesses don't care about how many people get infected, they care about losing money.
This needs to be plastered everywhere, shove it down peoples throats.
No matter how competent the current presidency could be, the US would still get massively fucked. Not Hillary, Bernie, Or Jeb Bush could have isolated this.
It's easy to go back in time and state what leaders should have done, when and how.
As the prime minister of Denmark said "We can either be remembered as being too aggressive, or too lenient on our approach with handling these situations. I chose to be remembered as more aggressive".
Remember, it's not the virus that are closing shops, it's politicians that are making decisions. What cost would be greater, lock the country down or let the virus spread? Governments are trying to figure this math out and create a balance.
It not about making excuses, it's about not being shelter minded and being realistic On what it possible and what is not.
Imagine if congress had been able to pass actual worker support and small business payroll subsidies instead of the shit sandwich that is this blind man's bluff stimulus that airlines are just going to pocket. Seriously, if they had made it possible for people to just go on extended pto while this is going on, then we wouldn't be having this massive unemployment that will take YEARS to get over
He's referring to employment. The nature of lockdowns and social distancing initiatives inherently cost jobs. Here in Canada I am close with 5 people who are now unemployed and several who had to lay off thier entire staff. Trudeau isn't to blame because I want him to shut everything down.
Of course Trump royally fucked literally everything else but joblessness is the nature or the beast.
What Trump will fail at certainly though is supporting the workers that have no jobs. He doesn't care about them and will instead start work up sooner to solve the problem and that will just spread disease.
Trump has done an absolutely horrible job dealing with the pandemic. That's not in question.
The unemployment numbers are unrelated to that. They are from the governors of the states closing businesses and issuing shelter in place orders.
The unemployment numbers are unrelated to that. They are from the governors of the states closing businesses and issuing shelter in place orders.
You could also argue that the decades long whittling away of social safety nets and other similar ideas and programs could have also lead to such an incident. Its not like the Virus just suddenly caused our entire way of life to collapse overnight because it was inevitable and unstoppable. Our government has been letting us down for a long time and this is simply the chickens coming home to roost.
Let me ask you a simple question:
Would you like to get fucked more or fucked less?
Trump has fucked us more.
So we most likely passed 10% unemployment with this weeks claims. The number of workers in the US is around 156 million.
I don't get why there is no system in place to prevent that.
Losing that many jobs at once makes a speedy recovery for the economy much harder. That's fucking dumb.
Losing that many jobs at once makes a speedy recovery for the economy much harder. That's fucking dumb.
Yeah, this is the issue. Unemployment was unavoidable with the enactment of social distancing, the response to this will be where Trump's incompetence truly shines, he's going to panic and attempt to "open America up" faster which will not help the economy much and will kill many more people than if the government just floated the economy for a few months.
A social security net is not free. The welfare state of Denmark, which has a very generous safety net, is currently being stress tested to it's limits. The Public finances are gonna get fucked.
There are roughly around 15.1 million working in restaurants, 16 million in hospitality, and 16 million in retail in the US. These are probably the top three industries being hit hard by this.
We don't live in a reality where we could argue what would have happened with any of them as President. We live in one with "I don't take responsibility at all" is President.
For a lot of people getting an "essential" retail job is such a massive pay cut over being unemployed that they're fucked either way. That's not even commenting on how essential retail jobs drastically increase your chance of exposure to the virus, and typically have much worse health care.
I live in a county with a fairly stable social safety net. That didn't stop my employer to lay me off the first chance they got.These things aren't really related. In our global economy, 80% of businesses at minimum are impacted by this mess. They don't care about safety nets for workers, they care about losing revenue due to lack of people importing and exporting stuff.
Like, sure, I'm better off getting laid off in Germany than I would be in the US, full healthcare and all, but I'm still without a job. As are a lot of other people.
That's what my wife and I are worried about. We are both well paid in essential fields, so this isn't really impacting us. But it IS impacting friends, and that's tough.
And people would be less fucked if the country actually focused on trying to lift people up and ensure their continued success even in a worse case scenario. I'd prefer taking a beating than having a gun unloaded in my gut.
If I get laid off I'm just going to get unemployment insurance and not even bother looking for a job. My kids are home, they need a full-time teacher and I feel horrible that they don't have one. Being able to devote myself full-time to them would be better than any job I could possibly find.
Sure, the rest of the industrialized world is getting their teeth kicked in -- but the US is especially at risk because its safety net has been chopped into pieces and major institutions are up to their eyeballs in debt.
Somehow, I don't think Denmark's largest mail carrier is at the verge of non-liquidity or that a quarter of their households are facing life without internet in an ultra competitive employment market.
Marginal groups are ultra fucked, since state governments have been using the internet to further gut public access and libraries are closed, making access to unemployment benefits even harder.
Somehow, I don't think Denmark's largest mail carrier is at the verge of non-liquidity or that a quarter of their households are facing life without internet in an ultra competitive employment market.
Marginal groups are ultra fucked, since state governments have been using the internet to further gut public access and libraries are closed, making access to unemployment benefits even harder.
I feel like this discussion is going right over your head and you are just on autopilot right now. We know Trump is an idiot and a monster. Unemployment is unavoidable right now if we want to flatten the curve.
His government could have done something to protect jobs, but they chose to let the jobs be lost. Republicans have chosen unemployment
Not to take the wind out of everyone's sails but this isn't just to Trump's credit. We're witnessing the collapse of capitalism when put under genuine strain.
My primary fear here, is that once things calm down and hiring picks back up, it's not going to do so at an even pace.
I see a huge benefit to how many other countries are handling worker assistance (offering to cover huge percentages of company payrolls to keep people employed, paid, and within their benefits structure) versus offering a short-term bolstering of UI (where a return to employment isn't guaranteed).
How many companies are figuring out right now that they can operate with fewer people?
Over the next month, how many furloughs and hour-reductions will transform into full layoffs?
Who's to say hiring returns, but the pay rates don't?
Shuffling this many people onto strained state systems is priming it all to fail spectacularly.
I see a huge benefit to how many other countries are handling worker assistance (offering to cover huge percentages of company payrolls to keep people employed, paid, and within their benefits structure) versus offering a short-term bolstering of UI (where a return to employment isn't guaranteed).
How many companies are figuring out right now that they can operate with fewer people?
Over the next month, how many furloughs and hour-reductions will transform into full layoffs?
Who's to say hiring returns, but the pay rates don't?
Shuffling this many people onto strained state systems is priming it all to fail spectacularly.
Definitely, but look at the protections for laid-off workers Trudeau is doing? Is it comparable to the US stimulus bill?
There is no nuance to anything I guess, it would have been as bad with any other person in charge I guess.
No unless the CARES bill added it. I've seen the lack of that short work policy cited as a weakness for the US economy in an analysis of the COVID situation.
I think arguing how badly Trump's response has been, and continues to be, by talking about how screwed the economy would be in this situation under a Hillary or Bernie or what have you administration is trying to brush off criticism of Trump. The truth is we don't know what would have happened or how badly the economy would look in these hypothetical realities. We only know this reality. And, in this reality, Trump's incompetence has made a bad situation worse.
You're 100 percent correct. Firing is faster and easier than hiring and training thousands of new employees. If only something had been done to keep business from having to lay off workers. The recovery from this is going to take years
As much as I loathe Trump, and as staggeringly bad as I find the US's response to the pandemic, these industries were fucked no matter who was in the White House or what they did. Their custom is just gone in a flash of steam, while the overheads are still there. No business can survive that for long, and all of those industries run with incredibly thin margins already, meaning that continuous operation is essential.
Here in the UK, the job retention initiative will reimburse employers 80% of their employees' wages if those employees can't work. So in theory bars, restaurants etc. could have only 20% of the payroll liabilities they had before the lockdown. But that's still 20% that they need to find from zero revenue. Big retailers have gone straight to defaulting on their rents to avoid mass lay-offs, but that's not sustainable - for many reasons.
Don't get me wrong: the job retention scheme is a great package, and it's saving people's lives and livelihoods - especially for B2B companies that can shift their entire operations to work from home with no real effect on business continuity. But it's usefulness for businesses that can't instantly slash their overheads is very limited.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that if you run a restaurant that isn't part of a massive chain, Trump's as good a punching bag as any when you go out of business, but you'd still be going out of business without him.
What happens to you afterwards, when you're unemployed? You can blame the US government for that - what with having one of the worst social safety nets of any Western nation and all.