Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk and Fox host Charles Payne can't wait to make life harder for Americans during the pandemic by taking away jobless benefits in order to force them to take jobs they don’t feel safe in or maybe can’t take because they need to care for family members.
Loudermilk appeared on Fox to tout his bill to cut extended jobless benefits. He called it “insanity that the government is paying people to be idle instead of taking the millions of jobs that are available right now.” He claimed to have “spent the last two weeks really integrating in the community, even working side by side with some folks in the construction industry” but he seems to have integrated almost entirely into the community of employers. Loudermilk added that the folks he spoke with “are desperate to get people not only to work for them, but to work for the suppliers.”
Neither Loudermilk nor Payne seemed interested in speaking to people who are not taking those jobs. They just announced, based on the "evidence" that one guy spends too much time sitting on his porch drinking coffee, that President Joe Biden has such “disrespect” for businesses that he’d rather pay people to stay home.
“For the government to actually pay people more to stay at home than employers can afford to pay them to come to work is insanity,” Loudermilk declared.
Payne described the Biden administration as “disrespecting businesses, particularly small businesses that are saying ‘you’re destroying us.’ They are completely ignoring them.”
Loudermilk added, “I’m actually hearing this from some Democrats back home who are small business owners that they’ve got to stop this insanity. They want to do this multiple-trillion dollar jobs stimulus package. We don’t need jobs stimulus other than the federal government to get out of the way.”
The only worker Loudermilk indicated he spoke with was “one guy in the construction industry who is very frustrated because he gets up before dawn” and “works until sundown” and then “goes to another project their company has to work in the evening. And when he does get to come home, he sees his neighbor two doors down sitting on the front porch drinking coffee because he knows that he doesn’t have to go back to work yet because the federal government will continue to pay him to stay at home. It’s frustrating to the worker as well.”
Payne piled on with a nasty stereotype: “Wait till they get together over the weekend to play video games. He’ll see how sharp his neighbor’s skills have gotten.”
Loudermilk laughed.
It was shades of Fox’s food-stamp boogeyman of a while back: a surfer who bought lobster with his SNAP card that Fox falsely suggested represented most or all SNAP beneficiaries. Fox’s John Roberts described the young man as having “chosen the life of a beach bum in this seaside paradise …sponging off the rest of us”
Not surprisingly, Payne gave the bill his endorsement, saying, “Congratulations on your bill. Let’s see how far it gets. Certainly, it’s needed.”
This South Dakota columnist makes a good argument against the right-wing argument that extended jobless benefits are keeping people from looking for work.
You can watch Loudermilk and Paine smear the unemployed as lazy, undeserving slackers below, from the May 10, 2021 Your World.
For me, Jesus’ message is rather more like “actions speak louder than words”. The best way to praise him is to behave in keeping with his teachings, i.e. like a true Christian. There are no free tickets to Paradise.
Further, if God is truly omniscient and omnipresent, there’s no way in hell that he’d be fooled by a calendar showing how many times a person turned up in Church. He’d be more likely to have his own list of that person’s actions, wouldn’t he? Simple logic.
I also seem to recall a saying about the poor being more likely to wind up in Paradise. That alone should wake up these so-called Christians.
Absolutely, Ellen. And this is where ignorance, both of history and the law of probabilities, is revealed in all its “glory”. The chances of their being “elites” is just as slim as it ever was in history.
The thing is, I think it’s worse than a lack of empathy. I think those people consider themselves superior and more deserving. Ultimately, I believe they’d be happy to go back to something like a feudal system where an elite few own everything and have all the rights and everyone else is in their service one way or another.
The privileged elites, most of whom have not done a lick of work since they last washed the neighbour’s car for cash, suffer from a lack of empathy with the difficulties faced by poor folk who find it hard to make ends meet. Unlike Marie Antoinette, however, I think today’s RWingers know full well that these families are having it hard, but they don’t care.
What really gets my goat is that these poor excuses for human beings have the nerve to call themselves Christians.
I’ll also note that the canard about overpaying the unemployed is offensive on a variety of levels. It’s not accurate, since people really do prefer to be able to work and earn a living if possible. And it’s a second barrel from the Right Wing that regularly exhort against raising the minimum wage.
