Don't Want A Worker Shortage? Stop Paying Starvation Wages!

The media hype over a supposedly widespread worker shortage gas been rife lately, and of course being blamed on a supposedly over-generous social safety net, particularly the expanded unemployment benefits put in place during the pandemic and still continuing to this day.  That supposedly makes it pay more to stay on the dole than to go back to work.  But the "absent referent" here, the biggest elephant in the room, is that wages are currently still too low.  If the federal minimum wage had kept up productivity gains since 1968, it would be about $22/hour today, similar to the current de facto minimum wage in most of the Nordic countries.  Given how the worker shortage is primarily concentrated in the lowest-paying jobs, the solution is very simple:  if employers want employees so desperately, then stop paying starvation wages, and pay the workers at LEAST what the market says they are really worth, and of course enough to, you know, LIVE on.  Problem solved.  Next.

In the meantime, as for the idea of unemployment benefits being too generous, if a true labor shortage were really a widespread problem, all they would need to do is take the extra $300/week bonus and instead repurpose that money as a wage subsidy to low-wage workers.  The latter bonus could be a sort of "reverse payroll tax" that automatically tops up one's paychecks directly.  Otherwise, leave the current benefits as is, albeit perhaps reinstating the work search requirements after some time, and require furloughed workers who are called back to their jobs to return to work after a reasonable amount of time.

It is worth noting that an actual Universal Basic Income (UBI) contains no such perverse incentives (unlike over-generous unemployment benefits), since one can still receive it regardless rather than have to give it up upon returning to work.  But it can still effectively increase the bargaining power of workers, increasing the de facto minimum wage.

One Weird Trick, Part Deux

It just so happens that the very next day after we posted our "One Weird Trick to Rescue Economy" article, the highly progressive former Democratic Congressman Dennis Kuchinich posted an article of his own at The Nation.  Titled "Our Political Economy Is Designed to Create Poverty and Inequality", the article discusses how the economy is currently rigged in favor of the top 1% (especially the top 0.01%) at the expense of the ever-growing poor and ever-shrinking middle class.  This rigging is done through the tax code, obviously, but also through more subtle machinations such as the privatization racket (where formerly public services and utilities are privatized, at the expense of the people and for the benefit of the rich) which also includes our monetary system and the privately-owned FERAL Reserve that has controlled it for over a century now.

And most notably, he discusses a bill that he himself sponsored in 2011-2012 called the NEED Act, which would have ended this monetary racket via an independent Treasury (much like Ellen Brown's public banking idea) and the abolished the scam known as fractional-reserve banking.   The newly-created greenbacks would then be used to create full employment via funding much-needed improvements in infrastructure as well as education, healthcare, and other government spending, which would have been a great stimulus to the economy.   The bill would also restore the federal usury cap to an even lower 8% (it was 12% before it was removed in 1978) as well.  It even had the potential to also create a citizen's dividend (aka a Universal Basic Income), provide universal healthcare, shore up Social Security, and solve so many other problems at once.  Overall, an excellent bill.  But of course, the cowardly and venal Congress unfortunately did not pass it.

In case you were worried whether such an idea would create hyperinflation, allow us to put that fear to rest.  Currently, the private banks create new money out of thin air all the time, every time they make a loan.  The FERAL Reserve does this too, most notably the secret $16 trillion (which eventually became more like $29 trillion) bailout of the banks just a few years ago.  So why not have this process be publicly controlled and used for the benefit of We the People rather than the oligarchs?

As Ellen Brown notes, the Weimar hyperinflation in Germany from 1921-1924 occurred while the money was being created by the private banks.  Germany had been punished with crippling debt by the Allies in the aftermath of WWI, and they needed to create a lot of money to pay it.  The biggest problem, though, were the speculators who shorted their currency (betting that it would go down in value), which became a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the banks just kept on printing more and more marks to satisfy the speculators' demands, creating a vicious cycle of runaway hyperinflation.  The madness only stopped once the government got a handle on it by finally taking back control of the money supply in 1924, which was followed by a few years of relative prosperity before the deflationary Great Depression began in 1929.  And Brown also notes, as we noted in our previous article, that Germany got out of the Depression by using the "one weird trick" themselves (too bad they didn't do it much sooner, that is, before you-know-who took over in 1933).

(And just in case anyone predictably tries to play the "Jew card" after reading this, keep in mind that most oligarchs/banksters are actually WASPs rather than Jews, and have been for quite a while now.  Even the Vatican has their own bank now.  And the TSAP does not condone anti-Semitism of any kind.)

So what are we waiting for?  Let's finally put an end to artificial scarcity and artificially-created unemployment for good. Yesterday.