Employment Insurance

This is Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s latest brain…storm.

The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee proposes getting all 50 states to adopt and dramatically scale up short-time compensation programs—also known as work sharing—in which businesses and companies in distress keep workers employed at reduced hours, with the federal government helping to make up the difference in workers’ wages.

That’s not going to do anything other than shift a part of a worker’s pay from the company employing him to us taxpayers.  With Uncle Sugar—that’s us—picking up part of the tab, companies would have no incentive to keep workers employed fulltime, much less pay them a full wage. They would have an incentive to claim this or that distress.

Such a move also would distort cost-signaling by masking the true cost of labor to a company. That would flow, in turn, to inaccurate price signaling in the market place, since the prices buyers would see would not be tied to the seller’s true costs.

This is just another example of Progressive-Democrats looking to expand their welfare cage and gild it with taxpayer money.