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Editor's Note
If you spend enough time reading social media - Facebook remains my drug of choice - you might start believing that the federal government has single-handedly created an employment crisis by paying people who were formerly willing to work 40 hours a week so much that they are now too lazy to leave their recliners.
One Arkansas business executive emailed me the other day to bemoan the labor shortage that launched a thousand Facebook memes. He allowed that it is "hard to blame people who draw up to $1,000 a week who just don't want to go back to work until it ends."
Huh?
No one in Arkansas is getting $1,000 a week in unemployment benefits these days, and the folks who were getting that much for a few months last year had been laid off from jobs paying nigh unto $50,000. Those weren't the folks who were most likely to become unemployed because of the pandemic, and they aren't the folks that businesses are having trouble hiring back.
The federal supplement to state unemployment income was $600 a week for 17 weeks last year. That really was a windfall for low-income employees, and actually replaced 100%...