The Spark

the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist

“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx

Governors:
Cut Pandemic Aid

Jun 7, 2021

Governors in half the states have announced they will cut off the extra $300 per week to all those getting it in unemployment benefits by the end of June. These are federal funds, due to the pandemic, not funds being spent by the states’ politicians from the budgets they oversee.

Some of these politicians blame those getting unemployment benefits for not taking jobs offered. Businesses claim there are two million jobs they cannot fill.

Even before the pandemic, there were at least one million jobs supposedly being offered but not gaining applicants. Yet the media was not filled with stories blaming the unemployed.

The reality has been the same not just for a year or two but for a decade or two. The majority of jobs offered are minimum wage, without benefits, not even full-time.

In other words, just as working people could barely make ends meet before the pandemic, they can barely make ends meet now. An extra $300 per week never solved this problem—the inability to pay the rent, the inability to afford wi-fi and computers in every household, not to mention the ridiculous amounts people pay to for-profit companies for water and heat and electricity.

For the 140 million people filing individual taxes in 2019, at least 14 million of them reported living on $15,286 or less and another 14 million had less than $30,000 per year as income. So at least one in every five adults has difficulty with eating or paying the rent ... in the world’s richest country measured per person.

In the 21st century, we live in a society where one in five adults barely gets by and where one in three adults is NOT even in the work force. Of course, some are retired or disabled, but that is millions more adults who might be able to work ... if they were paid a decent wage.

Neither the governors nor the businesses nor the media talk about those figures!