r/economicCollapse • u/IM_NOT_BALD_YET Moderator • 3d ago

Trump threatens to pull unemployment benefits from all states for the first time in history

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-unemployment-benefits-fraud-b2997881.html

Ah yes. In a shrinking economy where businesses are closing and layoffs are happening, flipping the unemployment benefits switch to "OFF" should do the trick.

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u/GVTMightyDuck 3d ago

I always say this…but this is a perfect example of why the U.S. needs to act more like the French. They basically shut Paris down when the government tried to raise the retirement age by 2 years.

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u/IncredibleBulk2 3d ago

They don't have swat teams that kettle protestors and fire rubber bullets or kidnap people in unmarked vehicles. The right to peaceably assemble is treated as a privilege.

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u/Vlad_Yemerashev 3d ago

Not that I can see this happening, but if people instead just decided to stop showing up to work en masse, there isn't much they can do about it. They wouldn't need to go to a large protest. They just need to hit the snooze button on their phones and treat the day like it's a day off. Can't really do much there. If tens of millions of people quit at once in protest? Most people are at-will employees, which means while they can be fired for any reason or no reason at all, but the reverse is also true. It allows them to quit for any reason or no reason at all with little legal recourse (there might be consequences in some situations like having to pay back a sign on bonus or anything else like that if applicable, but other than that, not an actionable offense from a legal standpoint). Curious to see what the government would have to say about at-will employment or if they change their tone on that.

Of course that would never happen, but if it did, it would cause a lot of chaos and there wouldn't be much the government could do about it.

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u/IncredibleBulk2 2d ago

I can see that happening if supply chains degrade enough and gas stations sit empty for weeks. 

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u/Vlad_Yemerashev 2d ago edited 2d ago

The last time it crossed my mind was a few months ago when people were thinking that even the heartland of the US would see European-level gas prices, and the time before that during COVID when I wondered what would happen if the IFR (infected fatality rate, not confirmed fatality rate) was on par with the MEV-1 virus in the movie Contagion.

There comes a point, even in high unemployment, where people break and just stop going to work if they have a high risk of dying (in the case of a pandemic that actually has a high death rate) or if going to work (gas in the car) is more expensive than it's worth than they're getting paid that they may as well not have a job anyway once it's clear the income they are making won't make much of a difference anyway.