Another double standard

I was disappointed to see that Gov. Jim Justice plans to cut unemployment insurance benefits on June 19 while the state and nation are still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic aftershocks.

Specifically, he plans to end the federal $300 weekly supplement to benefits that were part of the American Rescue Plan, presumably because people receiving the benefit are “scamming the system.”

Under the Rescue Plan, the supplemental benefits would expire on Sept. 6 in any case.

The cuts would impact around 42,000 West Virginians, including 18,000 or so self-employed or contract workers who have lost work due to the pandemic. It would mean a loss to the state’s economy of $12.6 million per week.

When you multiply that by 12, the number of weeks between the state and federal deadlines, that means a loss of over $151 million to West Virginia’s economy. That amounts to losing the equivalent of 3,775 jobs paying $40,000 for a year.

The infusion of pandemic-related boosts to unemployment insurance and the spending they allowed have saved millions of jobs, kept businesses open, boosted GDP (gross domestic product), increased personal income, kept people in their homes and saved countless families from disaster. As of May 15, Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation has brought more that $1.2 billion to West Virginia alone.

When the cuts come, unemployment benefits will drop back to their normal level of replacing around 40% of income from the lost job. Losing that much income is tough any time, but at least a delay until September would give the economy more time to recover.

This is another example of a curious double standard in which nobody in power bats an eye over corporate giveaways or tax cuts for the rich that create no jobs or lowering severance taxes on out of state companies, but cows are had when benefits to ordinary people seem too generous.

The snarky writer H.L. Mencken once defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” What we’re dealing with here is the haunting fear that somewhere, somehow a peasant might catch a break. Otherwise, how could the merry race to the bottom for working people continue?

No wonder groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are pushing to end the benefits; they want to pay people as little as possible.

I don’t make a cult of our current economic system, but there is a simple market-based solution to the problem if people are concerned about a labor shortage: it’s the supply and demand thing.

In a market system, when demand for a commodity is higher than the supply the remedy is simple: increase the price. That sends a signal that prompts others to bring more of the commodity to the marketplace, ending the shortage.

Like it or not, in a capitalist economy, labor power is a commodity and a higher price for it means higher wages.

In recent decades, corporate profits as a share of GDP have dramatically increased. So has the income and wealth of the most affluent. So has productivity. The same can’t be said of workers’ wages.

As David Leonhardt recently wrote in the New York Times, “If anything, wages today are historically low. They have been growing slowly for decades for every income group other than the affluent. As a share of gross domestic product, worker compensation is lower than at any point in the second half of the 20th century.”

This is especially true of West Virginia, where median income is nearly the lowest in the nation.

The problem, Leonhardt argues, is that in recent years we’ve come to accept low wages as the norm. Maybe that’s what needs to change.

(This first appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Time to end a double standard

 Among other things, Jesus was a master of the one-liner. The gospels are full of zingers that cut to the heart of the matter.

One of my favorites is a line he used about the misplaced priorities of some of his opponents: “Blind guides, you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.”

At that time, many religiously observant people would strain the water they drank to avoid swallowing unclean insects. It was Jesus’ way of pointing out that, sometimes, we make a big deal of small things while ignoring major ones.

There are plenty of examples of that today. One of the biggest has to do with different attitudes toward the rich and the poor (come to think of it, Jesus had another camel/needle’s-eye zinger about that).

It’s long been known to public health researchers that high levels of inequality in wealth and income have negative effects on diseases, mortality, longevity, crime, addiction, happiness, social trust and other quality-of-life issues. And, in 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that income inequality was the highest it had ever been since it began tracking it.

COVID-19 made all that worse. Millions of Americans have lost jobs and benefits or have had to cut back on hours of work. Many are in danger of foreclosure or eviction when protections expire.

Meanwhile, the international humanitarian group Oxfam, in a report appropriately titled “The Inequality Virus,” found that, while “Over two million people have died, and hundreds of millions of people are being forced into poverty while many of the richest — individuals and corporations — are thriving. Billionaire fortunes returned to their pre-pandemic highs in just nine months, while recovery for the world’s poorest people could take over a decade.”

According to The Guardian, a Swiss bank recently reported that “billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter [27.5%] at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes.”

Thanks mostly to the stock market, the wealth of billionaires increased to $10.2 trillion, up from the previous peak of $8.9 trillion in 2017. The number of billionaires also increased, from 2,158 to 2,189, in the same period.

That would be the camel we’re swallowing.

The gnat that’s being strained out is hesitancy to pass a long-overdue measure to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 over several years. The minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25 for nearly a dozen years and is now, obviously, worth less that it was then.

According to economist Dean Baker, if the minimum wage had kept pace with gains in worker productivity since 1968, it would be around $24 an hour today.

It’s an idea supported by a vast majority of Americans. The Pew Research Center has found that over two-thirds of Americans (67%) support the increase to $15. This includes a substantial number of Republicans (43%), including a majority of self-described Republican moderates.

The Economic Policy Institute estimates that passing the increase would benefit around 40 million Americans, over 38 million adults, nearly 24 million full-time workers, 23 million women, over 11 million parents, 5.4 million single parents and the parents of 14.4 million children. In 2019, the EPI estimated that this would benefit 255,000 workers in West Virginia.

These are the front-line workers who put their bodies, health and lives on the line to keep the country going in the midst of this crisis. It’s time to do right by them.

Jesus also said, “The laborer deserves to be paid.”

(This appeared as a column in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Mask or ventilator?

It kind of baffles me that so many people seem to pop their clogs when asked to wear masks to protect themselves and others from the coronavirus.

If I wanted to get Freudian about it, which is kind of fun sometimes, I might speculate that they see this as some kind of symbolic neutering imposed on them by authorities unconsciously associated with father figures.

Holy Oedipus complex, Batman!

(There’s nothing like a little recreational psychoanalysis every now and then.)

However, I’m not wedded to that idea. After all, Freud supposedly said that, sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

Sometimes, I think some people see it as an attack on their sense of whiteness and/or masculinity. I haven’t done an exhaustive statistical demographic analysis, but I suspect that kind of reaction does seem to be most common among those who might strongly self-identify in one or both of those categories.

Whatever the case, I’d urgently like to say that, if you think masks are bad, just try a ventilator sometime.

I found that out the hard way more than 15 years ago. I’d been doing a lot of endurance events, including the Charleston Distance Run and an Olympic-distance triathlon, but I kept getting slower and slower.

Then, I started getting a weird pain in the right shoulder. Usually, I could push past things like that but, this time, it shut me down.

At the time, I thought it might be a shoulder injury sustained after I tried to do a judo throw on a guy built like a pyramid. I went to a physical therapist, who is now one of the most conservative members of the state Senate. He urged me to get a stress test.

I thought it was a crazy idea but went along with it, which might have been one of the few times we agreed on something. I say that with all respect and gratitude. That advice saved my life.

It turned out my major arteries were totally blocked. The term “widowmaker” was used. My capillaries were apparently keeping me alive, so all that running, however slow, paid off.

I got scheduled right away for a quadruple bypass.

I expected that to be a drag. In the days before minimally invasive surgery, this meant my sternum getting sawed in half and cracked open like a clam shell. There were other cuts and tubes to be endured.

What I didn’t know and wish someone would have told me was what waking up on a ventilator would be like.

I came to with a weird sensation in my throat. Some ginormous-seeming object was there that, in retrospect, reminds me of the space creature in the first “Alien” movie that latched on to that poor guy’s face before its baby popped out of his chest.

I wanted to gag, but that wasn’t an option. Then there was the fact that it was uncomfortable, to put it mildly.

Then there was the breathing. At first, I didn’t think it was happening but, eventually, I figured out that, since I wasn’t dead, the alien was breathing for me. But let’s just say it’s nothing like the real thing.

I think my reaction to all that, ironically, wound up keeping me on it longer than might have otherwise been the case.

Maybe things have changed since then. Maybe being intubated these days is like taking a ride on a magical unicorn. But that would surprise me.

Here’s the thing: I was on that for just a few hours. Some COVID-19 patients have been on one for days or weeks. Fortunately, those who are ventilated are generally put into a medically induced coma, so they don’t experience that kind of distress.

But still, the real or imagined indignity, discomfort or inconvenience of wearing a mask is pretty small stuff, considering other possibilities.

That person with a mask just might be keeping you from getting a tube down the throat. It might be nice to return the favor.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)