Businesses are crying for workers and the government is paying people not to work. From Greg Orman at realclearpolitics.com:
President Biden spoke at the White House earlier this week to address an unsettling national trend – millions of jobs going unfilled in an economy still struggling to right itself. The president couldn’t deny the existence of the paradox: His own administration’s numbers show that millions of Americans are drawing unemployment while millions of jobs are going unfilled. But he and his top economic officials dismissed the most obvious explanation for April’s dismal job numbers – generous unemployment benefits eroding the incentive to work. “We don’t see much evidence of that,” Biden said.
It was a line dutifully echoed by his designee to run the Commerce Department, the Cabinet department tasked with compiling employment numbers. But it’s a disingenuous argument. The Commerce Department, through the Bureau of Labor Statistics, derives employment numbers by compiling two surveys of employment – one completed by roughly 144,000 employers and another completed by approximately 54,000 American citizens. Neither of these surveys actually ask if an employee has been offered a job and turned it down. And it’s awfully hard to find evidence of something when you’re not actually looking for it.
Human rights experts accuse the Chinese government of detaining at least one million Muslims in Xinjiang in up to 380 internment camps, where they are subject to torture, mass rapes, forced labor and sterilizations. Pictured: The outer wall of an internment camp on the outskirts of Hotan, in China’s Xinjiang region. (Photo by Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)
