This week’s job report has everyone’s hair on fire. The GOP was busy declaring the unemployment bonus was responsible for giving the unemployed motivation to stay home with the Democrats panicking about how to get those same workers to get off their butts and take the jobs that were going begging. Maybe, as Chuck Todd stated on Sunday morning it’s time for everyone to take a breath. After all, the jobs report for last month showed a million new workers employed. Maybe we should all stop being day traders and try to take a longer view of what’s going on.
There are two obvious solutions if this week’s trend continues. One is to eliminate the bonus payment that raises benefits above what the workers had been paid to work. The other is to raise wages to a more equitable level. Your solution depends very much on how you see the world and even more on your political point of view.
For those who remain unaffiliated to any specific political philosophy the answer seems more of a crossover and as usual the solution becomes clearer as it moves closer to the center. Yes, we need higher wages in many parts of the country but there are certain regions that cannot sustain them. $15 an hour to a resident of NYC is pretty much poverty wages but in a small rural town in the Ozarks it might mean the difference between a small business failing or surviving. On the other hand, paying someone more to stay home than to go to work is ridiculous, a killer for the economy and a disaster for businesses that need workers to fill low pay level jobs.
If Trump and his dumbed down coterie of clowns were still in office, I would despair of any functional solution but I’m hoping Joe Biden and his people will manage to sell a better solution to the American people than “this is how socialism works.” What has managed to worm its way through the system and what is causing problems now is not socialism, nor is it any kind of solution to anything. It’s purely and simply a bump in the road that will lead us out the mess that Trump created. Everybody cool your jets. It will get worked out.
******
I never thought that I could, in any way agree with anything Liz Cheney said or would ever say, but in the past few weeks I have found myself rooting for her more and more in her fight with Donald Trump, his lies and his lying associates. I guess there’s something to say for “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Just not that close a friend, because we all know that once she gets tired of attacking Trump she will return to her regular attacks on logic.
Look, Cheney’s a real problem for the GOP but that doesn’t mean anyone should buy their bullshit about her not supporting their platform. It’s kind of impossible to support a platform that doesn’t exist. The Republican Party hasn’t now and seemingly never has had anything resembling a platform. They actually ran the last election without anything but Trump’s lies. When it came time to tell the American public what they believed in; they stood up, raised their right hands to the sky and said, “Heil Donald Trump.” That’s why they lost in 2020. That’s why they will lose again in 2022. There are currently enough voters in the United States who understand that Donald Trump is a dread disease to crush any movement of which he is the leader.
Don’t forget, Donald Trump didn’t just lose the 2020 election. He was stomped. He lost by over 7 million votes. SEVEN MILLION! That’s more votes than any other candidate has ever lost by. That’s not a race, that’s a demolition derby. That’s annihilation.
So why is a significant segment of the GOP still following him? Simply because they don’t know what else to do. They have existed so long without realistic political goals that they no longer know how to do anything but lie to themselves. Their real leader, Mitch McConnell, once a functioning politician, now slumps in his chair and babbles inanely about having no goal except keeping the Democrats from achieving anything during their time in office. Of course he knows that such nonsense will also keep the country from achieving anything, but he cares nothing about that, only about making it appear that the GOP aren’t the only incompetent, non-functioning group of assholes in Washington.
In that vein, Chris Christie double-talked his way through his gig as a panel member on This Weekby claiming that the people he is speaking to are not talking about Trump, not fighting to lead his resurgence and not whining about an election that they did actually lose. Sure this is just the fat man blowing smoke but the reality is, the GOP doesn’t want the Democrats to make any progress on any of America’s problems, while by the same token they don’t want to make any progress themselves, simply because they are in favor of maintaining the same status quo that is causing most of those problems.