Tucker: Americans are being paid to stay at home
'Tucker Carlson Tonight' host reacts to 'troubling' April jobs report
What would happen if you gave a group of angry, ignorant ideologues, the same people who tell you that all lives don’t matter – what would happen if you gave them the keys to the U.S. economy? We don’t need to guess about that. We are finding out now. Because all around us, there are signs that under this White House, things are getting dangerously flakey in our economy.
Here’s one example: the official government jobs numbers came out today. Unemployment is up, far higher than expected. Close to 14 million Americans say they want to work but cannot find a job. That’s an old story, but here’s the new twist. At the very moment that unemployment is rising, fewer people are working, American businesses say they can’t find employees. And it’s obvious they can’t. Go to the nearest strip mall, and count the ‘Help Wanted’ signs on the door. They’re everywhere.
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Restaurants are closing because they can’t find anyone to hire. So are manufacturing plants. That means America now has far too many workers, but simultaneously far too few workers. How can that be?
Another question: what happened to all the consumer products? Many of the things you buy and need to buy are more expensive than they’ve ever been. Inflation is real, it’s galloping. Yet at the same time, a lot of products seem to have gone missing completely.
The United States is currently experiencing shortages of chicken, generators, roofing materials, lumber, ketchup, bicycles, diapers, ammunition, automobiles, plastics, appliances, chlorine, pork and propane tanks. Among other things. Keep in mind, this is peacetime. We haven’t mobilized for a foreign war. Yet we’re now getting reports that we should brace for a gas shortage this summer. Why is this all happening? Because things are so great in the economy. That’s what they’re telling us.
CBS ANCHOR: This week, there were more signs that the U.S. economy is roaring back to life. And they come as President Biden is proposing trillions of dollars in new government spending.
JILL SCHLESINGER, CBS: This is really good news. This week we found out that in the first quarter of this year the economy expanded at a 6.4% annualized rate. That is huge!
CNBC ANCHOR: Could we see a great economy and a lousy return for the stock market?
GOLDMAN’S KATIE KOCH: Becky, I think the good news for everybody is that we’re actually probably going to see both. That we’re going to continue to see a strong economy and we are also set up actually for some great equity market returns here.
There’s an awful lot of lying in financial journalism. No one ever says that, but it’s self-evident.
They’re telling us things are great. Why are they telling us that? Because the stock market is way, way up. Could it be overvalued? Take a look at those price-to-earnings ratios. Can they continue? Is that reality-based? Oh, just relax. But be sure to stock up on gasoline. And diapers if you can. We could be looking at Soviet grocery shelves soon.
And whatever you do keep ignoring inflation right in front of you. Oil prices for example have risen 12 percent in a single month.
Steel prices have tripled since last year.
Chicken breast prices have doubled, just since Biden became president.
The price of eggs has increased by almost five percent.
Major appliances are up almost 15%.
Ground beef and fresh fruits, both up almost six percent.
The median sales price of existing homes has increased by 16 percent.
And then there’s lumber. Have you noticed lumber? Since last year, the price of dimensional lumber has gone up by almost 300%. Want a thousand board feet? That’ll be $1,359. That price has never been higher. According to the National Association of Home Builders, the cost of materials adds more than $35,000 extra dollars to the price of a new single-family home.
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Why is this happening? Well, there’s too much cash in the system. That’s a big reason for it. Print too much fake money and the value of that fake money declines. People start to figure out that it’s not real and you get inflation. That’s always true. No one disputes this. The White House just doesn’t care. The Treasury secretary told you not to worry about inflation. It’s not a concern.
JANET YELLEN: And I think the economy is going to get back on track. I don’t anticipate that inflation is going to be a problem. But it is something that we’re watching very carefully… I don’t think there’s going to be an inflationary problem…You know, President Biden has also proposed further substantial spending packages we would love to see enacted into law.
Keep spending trillions of made-up dollars to pay off your political consistencies because there won’t be an "inflationary problem." Right. Thanks, genius. How’d you get that job, anyway? They're just hoping you won’t notice that you can’t afford anything anymore. You’ll be too distracted by the fact you don’t have electricity.
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The Sacramento Bee reported a few days ago that California energy officials "can't promise they'll be able to keep the lights on this summer." Oh, no lights in your home? Not big deal. We’ll use candles, and dig a pit latrine.
Meanwhile, in Texas, which is supposed to be sane, the Dallas Morning News is telling us that "inefficient homes" are to blame for the state's massive power outages this winter.
So, it was your fault the power went out. You had the wrong kind of house. It definitely wasn’t the fault of stupid and corrupt renewable energy schemes, the ones that forced people to rely on windmills, which froze when it got cold. Nope. It wasn’t their fault. It was your fault. Your house did it. Get a better house. Too bad lumber’s so expensive.
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The question is, even if you could afford lumber, who’s going to do the construction? In the middle of rising unemployment, somehow we don’t have enough workers. There is, they keep telling us in Washington, a "labor shortage," which presumably is why we need to open the borders and let millions of new foreign workers in. Immediatley. So what is going on here? Probably a lot of things. It’s a huge country and a pretty complicated country. But here’s one reason behind what we’re seeing: the government is paying people to stay home.
Thanks to Joe Biden's $2 trillion "Coronavirus relief bill," – done under the justification of the pandemic - some people in this country are getting checks for $700 a month not to work. This is true across the country, even in Louisiana the state with the lowest weekly unemployment benefits, you can still make almost $500 a week by not working. For a 40 hour work week, that works out to a little about $12 an hour, well above the minimum wage. In the states with the highest unemployment assistance, you could be making close to $20 an hour for not working. Now, we’re not attacking anyone or calling anyone lazyIt's easy to see why people aren't returning to work. They’re not crazy. They’re rational.
No order the economy is sputtering in bizarre ways. America created just 266,000 jobs last month, in a country of 350 million people. Economists, the people who predict these things, very often incorrectly, were expecting four times that. The numbers were so shockingly bad, even CNBC didn't believe them at first. They had to double-check on the air.
STEVE LIESMAN: It looks like 266,000 (jobs added) It looks like it was a big disappointment at 266. But maybe I have that wrong. Let me double-check the bureau website here. One second. Yes, 266 is correct. Unemployment changed to 6.1 percent.
So, there’s not, to restate, an actual shortage of American workers, citizens who could fill jobs. They're just telling you that so they can justify opening the borders and changing the electorate so they can justify opening the borders and changing the electorate so they never lose another election and no one ever takes their power away. But that’s not true. What is true, once again, is the government is paying people more not to work than to work. And so why would they work, would you?
The question is, what do you do if you’re an employer? At some point, when we devalue the currency so completely that printing more dollars won’t help, we’re going to need actual employers in this country. And what do they do?
A reporter named Nate Doughty at the Pittsburgh Business Times looked into it. He spoke to businesses around Pittsburgh that had managed to hire people. What was their secret? They just had to double the wages. A place called Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor, which has been around since 1923, hiked its starting wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour. They more than doubled it. A nearby Sports Bar now guarantees waiters and bartenders $20 an hour. This is happening in a ton of places around the country. And big companies, needless to say, can compete more effectively because they have more money.
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A Burger King in Washington, Pennsylvania is offering a $1,500 bonus to new workers.
A McDonald's in Florida is giving people $50 just for showing up to a job interview.
A company called Sisu Energy in Texas is offering new truck drivers $14,000 a week.
Walmart, the largest private employer in the country, raised wages for nearly half a million employees in February. The company's average wage is now over $15 an hour. In some way, that is good news, you want to see people make more. Of course, you want dollars to be worth more, and now they’re worthless. But there are effects of this that we could be living with for a long time. There are millions of small businesses that cannot afford to compete. They’re not Wal-Mart, and many of them will go under because of the pressure applied by the U.S. government on the labor market. And when those small businesses do go under, what will be left? Amazon.
This article is adapted from Tucker Carlson's opening commentary on the May 7, 2021, edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight."
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