As the COVID-19 pandemic closes much of the service and entertainment industries and renders superfluous, hopefully temporarily, many jobs in said industries, our social system is feeling the strain:
As Americans turn to unemployment insurance, some are finding they do not qualify. Or if they do, the average payment of $385 a week is modest. In some states, there is a week-long waiting period before the first payment arrives.
“Workers expect unemployment insurance to be there for them in a downturn. A bunch of workers are about to find out that it’s not,” said Martha Gimbel, a labor economist at Schmidt Futures who was formerly at Indeed.com. “This is a real-life nightmare. Every hole we allowed to grow in our social safety net is hitting us all at once.” …
Many economists are urging Congress to quickly boost funding for state unemployment insurance. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act that President Trump signed Wednesday included $1 billion to help states with administrative costs of processing unemployment insurance, but additional stimulus will be needed to cover more people. Twenty-three states were already running low on money in their unemployment trust funds before the pandemic hit. [WaPo]
If I were one of those searching for and not finding unemployment benefits, I’d be asking Where does the responsibility lie? And while I haven’t done the research to discover that, it seems likely the GOP, legendarily parsimonious with unemployment benefits, and well-known to have, as a minor religious tenet of the Party, the belief that everyone would refuse to work if they could get away with it, bears some responsibility.
Since the Democrats will be asking it, let’s ask ourselves: is it valid for the Democrats, stipulating that the Republicans are mostly guilty of rending the social safety net, to use these failures as an attack vector during the various campaigns over the summer?
No doubt the guilty will scream NO!, but I think it is a valid political question.
Look: it is the responsibility of government to provide for disasters and emergencies. The private sector has neither the authority nor the ability to coordinate for the various needs and requirements, and its motivations make it ill-suited to try. The government must be prepared and adequately funded for disasters. If it’s not, then either the disaster is beyond imagining – and, despite President Trump’s ribald attempts to claim the answer is that it was beyond imagining, it was really on the radar of disaster specialists for decades – or someone or some group is a systemic failure.
And there’s no reason that the political enemies of the screwups shouldn’t take advantage of it; indeed, it would be a dereliction of duty to not do so.
And, hey, if the Democrats are the responsible Party, then the Republicans should be at their throats, instead.
But in the end, a disaster doesn’t make the associated political questions invalid. After all, we should be all about preventing them, not rationalizing them.
