Cutting Jobless Benefits Did NOTHING To Spur Job Growth

According to a new report, the decision by many states to cut extended unemployment benefits did absolutely nothing to spur job growth. This was pretty much expected, and the real reason that states decided to cut back on the payments was just to be intentionally cruel. People are not inherently lazy, as Republicans like to claim, and those who couldn't find work were unfairly punished because of that decades-old talking point. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins discusses this new report.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Sometimes studies come out that confirm what we all already knew, but they're still very important. And that's what we've got right here right now. A recent report has found that cutting back on the extended unemployment benefits before their expiration last September, mostly happening obviously in red states across the country, did not spur on job creation the way that these Republican governors had told us that it would. These Republican governors were telling us that all these people out there getting these hundreds of dollars extra per week in unemployment benefits, they're just living high off the government's hog and they don't want to go back to work because they're making so dang much money not working. So what this report out of San Francisco found was that there actually was an uptick in the employment levels in the states that cut the unemployment benefits early, but it was 0.2%. Meaning in states that didn't cut the benefits early, if they had an employment rate of 4%, the other states that did cut it would have 4.2%.

So a statistically insignificant number. But then the report mentions something that really should be taken into account and I'm shocked that they didn't do this. They said we also didn't look at the individual industries and where these jobs were basically coming from. And then they admitted that we're talking about red states that ended the unemployment benefits early, where a lot of them have big service industry jobs. So, you know, that played a massive role. People that wait tables, people that are bartenders, people that bus tables, restaurant managers, things like that, places that had closed during the pandemic, but reopened last summer because they just said, ah, to hell with it, we're reopening. So people went back to their jobs. They weren't great jobs a lot of 'em, they weren't high paying jobs and of course it had nothing to do with cutting back the unemployment benefits. So even that modest increase, that 0.2% increase, cannot actually even be attributed to them cutting back those unemployment benefits.

What can be attributed to that, however, is cruelty because that's what this was. This was Republicans pushing a decades old talking point that people are inherently lazy. That they just don't wanna work. They wanna lay around on their couch all day, watching Netflix, getting government checks, not having to do a thing, right? That's what Republicans and of course some Democrats like Joe Manchin think the American public is. That's what they think of you people. So why the hell are you voting for them? That's the big question I have. When these politicians go out there and they make these claims and they make these decisions based on this completely false talking point. Why the hell would you vote for somebody that thinks you're a lazy idiot who just wants to get fat off the government? I know I wouldn't. That seems very stupid to me. So I don't know. Maybe when you head to the polls this November, maybe think about things like that a little bit, right? Probably not a smart idea to vote for the people that continue to insult you and think you're just a lazy piece of crap. But that's just my opinion.