Peter Schiff: Unemployment compensation — the new early retirement & 3rd rail of American politics

Mr Schiff discusses the dead-cat bounce of the Dollar index this week before moving onto the growth of unemployment culture in the US, and the moral hazard of the US instituting semi-permanent unemployment benefit [something we are very familiar with in the UK].

Businesses in the US are now having difficulty finding people to do low-paying work, he claims, because potential workers will then lose their unemployment benefit.  Schiff calculates that an unemployed US person can now ‘earn’ $4,000 Dollars a month by keeping out of official employment, and that the incentive of having this ‘free’ income and all of the associated leisure time may even be tempting some people into becoming deliberately unemployed.

[No, surely not?]

It seems the Obama administration is hellishly bent on creating the same perverse anti-work welfare incentives and socialist poverty traps that we ‘enjoy’ in Europe, where unemployed people face huge regressive marginal taxes on their earnings from any new job, which becomes a massive incentive to remain permanently on the dole, particularly if your earning potential is at the lower end of the scale and you feel lost within the tax credit benefit labyrinth constructed by Byzantine bureaucrats.

[Which even someone with a PhD in quantum physics would struggle to deal with, here in the UK.]

Well done, America.

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