RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Why aren't Americans going back to work?

The company I work for (we find customers and then forward them off to a client for a commission) just lost two clients over the past couple of months, not because we aren't sending them enough leads, but because they are no longer able to keep up with the demands.

One of them is a construction firm, that is currently not accepting new projects because they are backlogged, and the other is a small pest control company that had to close down because they no longer have enough staff.

Both clients have problems with labor because their workers are not interested in coming back, and have been subsisting on welfare and stimulus checks.

What happened here? My boss told me it's happening across the board throughout the US, and that many workers are simply not coming back to work. Is this sustainable at all? Wouldn't businesses close down if they don't have enough workforce, and that means the government will lose out on tax money that's used to sustain social welfare - which means the people who are relying on them will have to go back and look for jobs (that are no longer there because the companies have already closed?)

What's the endgame in this?

Sorry if this seems ignorant. The country I live in is severely lacking in social welfare so it's either work or die here. Or mooch from relatives (or commit crimes).

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Literally millions of Americans are receiving large checks every month from Biden's federal government to stay home. People who are making the same or more to stay home, so they don't have incentive to work. If Trump were president now instead of Biden, those subsidy checks would have ended, and people would have already gone back to work. But since these millions of people get paid to stay home, they take the free money and don't go back to work. MILLIONS of them.
While it was arguably necessary for a while in early/mid 2020, at least till we knew what we were dealing with regarding Covid-19, it is no longer necessary. We know how to protect ourselves, we know the vulnerable population who need to be protected (the elderly, and the immune-compromised). In the U.S. (according to the CDC's own website) 94% of people who died with Covid-19, died of some co-morbid condition (hear disease, cancer, asthma, or some other immune-compromised condition). And hundreds of thousands who died could have been saved with Hydroxychloroquine or Ivermectin, but were instead denied proper care and ended up choking to death on their own lung fluids, unnecessarily. The point is not even to prevent or treat Covid-19, but to use the Covid crisis to enact massive socialist/authoritarian change, to weaponize Covid, to crush their political opposition. And not just in the U.S., but in many countries. It is equally disturbing, if not even more so, to see what is occurring in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and many nations across Europe. Only Sweden that I'm aware of never locked down its economy and citizens, and escaped the self-inflicted damage of all these other nations.

What's really infuriating is, just as you said, this is collapsing businesses, who are struggling to keep the doors open with a combined threat of decreased revenue, inability to find employees (who are getting paid to stay home), supply chain interruptions, and their overhead costs that remain the same. Many bars and restaurants and small businesses have closed.
And that is precisely the purpose, to crush all independent thought and business, to increase government dependency (and people vote for the party of more government when they are dependent on it), to consolidate authoritarian control.

Another infuriating example are people who own a few properties and rent them out. 20 months ago, the people renting in these properties were told they didn't have to pay rent for the duration of the Covid crisis, but the owners who rent to them still have to pay their mortgages, with no money coming in, and they likewise are struggling to keep their properties, many on the edge of foreclosure. I've read multiple articles about these renters or homeowners who have gotten an indefinite leave from having to make those monthly payments, combined with receiving large federal checks to stay home, but not required to pay rent, are resulting in a surge in boat sales and sale of other luxury items. While their landlords are going broke.

I think that is exactly the purpose of much of what the Democrat-Bolsheviks have implemented over the last 20 months or so: To use those subsidies to enact a social revolution, to crush capitalism, to expand socialism and government dependency. Or at best implement "state-run capitalism", where the authoritarian government decides which businesses will succeed with federal endorsement, and which businesses (often conservative businesses, their ideological opposition, and not Democrat allies) , will be crushed and driven out of business.
In the words of Barack Obama early in his presidency, "We're going to punish our enemies and reward our friends."

What is happening now is the same thing as under Obama, only on a far more vast scale, with a Democrat slush-fund in the trillions of dollars in "Covid relief" legislation. About 10 trillion in 2020, and already $6 trillion (and counting) this year. Ironically, using taxpayer dollars, to crush the taxpayer. And reward far-Left corporate donors, far-Left NGO's and literally millions of illegal immigrants who shouldn't be here (i.e., guaranteed Democrat voters, our replacements).

Stores like Walmart and Amazon, who are Democrat allies, were never closed, even during the worst period of Covid-19 in 2020. Corporate chains with cash reserves that could have far better weathered the financial strain of being closed during the crisis, but NEVER WERE forced to close.
They were classified "essential".
While right across the street, small businesses, gun shops, churches and others, were forced remain closed until they could no longer remain in business and had to permanently close. What stores were permitted to remain open seems very arbitrary, until you see who those who remained open were allied with. Then it all makes sense, from a Machiavellian perspective. Despite that customers to the other retail stores were subject to the same Covid-risk as those shopping at the larger corporate chain stores, some stores were deemed "essential", while those not Democrat/big-government/federal allies were labelled "risky". From what I can observe, the Democrats are trying to make this a permanent crisis, that continues to serve their interests. A manufactured crisis at this point.

The problems here are too deep to fully expand on here. Part of the problem is the jobs that do exist really don’t pay that much and have no benefits. Who wants to work at the gas station, quick mart, grocery store, Taco Bell, etc. for $12 an hour, 20 hours a week with no healthcare when they can stay home and make the same amount lying on their asses and get Medicare?

We shipped out most of the industries that actually make things and turned ourselves into a consumer society. That’s pretty much all we do now is buy stuff other countries make.

Now let’s talk about the manufacturing industries we do have, with bloated unions and administrative staff that make way too much money. The products they make are generally outside of the affordable comfort zone for most Americans. That’s why vehicles have gone to 72 month loans and higher with $700-$900 per month cost. That’s as much as a mortgage for a lot of families in rural communities. People can’t afford that so they keep what they have longer. Eventually lower sales and cost cutting leads to those plants closing down, costing thousands of jobs and with nowhere to go to apply their skills. Some go to school, some choose to remain unemployed and others go into the crappy retail and service industry that can’t support the kind of life many people want.

I think virtually all of what you say is accurate.
As occurred after 2010 when Obamacare was passed, employers with higher-paying salaries and full benefits were holding back on hiring, because they didn't know what new taxes and other corporate punishments were coming down from the Obama administration, and Obamacare obligated them to give healthcare and benefits to all full-time employees, that many medium and small businesses couldn't afford to do, and larger corporations that could provide healthcare to employees didn't want to spend the money. I worked in 2012-2013 for one of the largest corporations in my area, and they made "full time" a maximum of 32 hours, to assure they wouldn't be forced to pay for employee health insurance.

It was in the late 1990's and early 2000's that employers I worked for stopped offering health insurance as part of the package, and I noticed healthcare cost began to skyrocket. For 15-plus years up till then, my employers all provided health insurance as part of the salary offered. I took a job in 1999 with a financial company that for the first time DEDUCTED cost of healthcare from my wages, and it was a large chunk. I'd taken the job at a $7,000 raise over my previous job, but with the insurance deducted from my paycheck, I was actually earning the same takehome pay as my previous job. It was part of why I quit, I told my employer you offered "salary plus insurance", but in reality it was salary minus insurance. And many co-workers I discussed it with over my time there said they felt similarly deceived when taking their job offers as well. Since then I've had to pay my own insurance.

You're definitely accurate that the U.S. has become a service economy, and most of the industrial jobs have been "offshored" to third world countries in China, India, the Phillipines, and the rest of Southeast Asia, and Latin America. That's a trend that began in the 1970's and 1980's and accelerated in the 1990's forward. When Donald Trump was elected, he did what was considered the impossible, legislating economic incentives to bring many of those factories and jobs back to the United States.
And we all saw the instantaneous shift back to foreign dependency as soon as Biden and the Democrats seized power in Jan 2021. It has taken them less than 11 months to destroy the surge in economic growth (the largest in over 50 years) and oil independence (for the first time in over 70 years) that were giving us back our industry, jobs growth, and rising wages under President Trump, for the first time in decades.

But for the most part I'd agree that it's both the Democrats and Republicans who have been selling us out to lobbyists and corporations and foreign governments over that last 50 years, with declining our wages and moving our jobs and factories overseas, in what Pat Buchanan in Death of the West and his other books terms "bipartisan economic treason".
Luckily, Trump was not another establishment/RINO Republican, not part of the majority of Republicans who along with the establishment Democrats in an elite club have enriched themselves for decades feeding off the managed decline of the United States. To the detriment of the American people they were elected to represent. President Trump dragged the sellout Republicans kicking and screaming into doing the right thing for the American people, and for a few brief years, factories and jobs were seeing unprecedented growth, and wages were rising. I hope to see that return after the 2024 election.

In less than one year under Biden, wages have risen 2%, but inflation has risen almost 6%.
For those paying attention, that's roughly a 4% loss in wages, in Biden's first year.