I don’t get it….
If I was leasing TONS of office space in central city at how much a square foot?
And for the last pandemic year we had MOST of our workers doing the same job from home?
WTF would I want to KEEP spending money in center city???
Let’m work from home….
With the latest wave of return-to-office delays from Covid-19, some companies are considering a new possibility: Offices may be closed for nearly two years.
That is raising concerns among executives that the longer people stay at home, the harder or more disruptive it could be to eventually bring them back.
Many employees developed new routines during the pandemic, swapping commuting for exercise or blocking hours for uninterrupted work. Even staffers who once bristled at doing their jobs outside of an office have come to embrace the flexibility and productivity of at-home life over the past 18 months, many say. Surveys have shown that enthusiasm for remote work has only increased as the pandemic has stretched on.
“If you have a little blip, people go back to the old way. Well, this ain’t a blip,” said Pat Gelsinger, chief executive officer of Intel Corp. , whose company has benefited from the work-from-home boom. He predicts hybrid and remote work will remain the norm for months and years to come. “There is no going back.”
Return dates have been postponed repeatedly. On Thursday, Apple Inc. told corporate employees that its planned return to U.S. offices would be delayed until at least January….
Democrats Stay Silent as Unprecedented ‘Benefits Cliff’ Approaches
By MATT WEIDINGER
American Enterprise Institute in National Review
August 25, 2021 6:30 AM
¶ 7.5 million Americans are set to lose expanded federal unemployment benefits on Labor Day, yet progressive policymakers aren’t talking about it. Why?
On Labor Day, an estimated 7.5 million individuals are expected to see their temporary federal unemployment benefits come to an abrupt end. But even though that will mark the largest shutoff of such benefits in American history, two political dynamics have made mention of the approaching benefits cliff all but taboo in progressive policy circles: The cliff was designed by the Democratic authors of the March 2021 American Rescue Plan, and it will disproportionately affect residents of blue states.
The 7.5 million Americans poised to lose benefits in two weeks is a huge figure, exceeding the combined population of the cities in Major League Baseball’s two Central Divisions — Chicago, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Kansas City. As the chart below shows, the coming benefits cliff is almost six times “steeper” than the next-steepest such cliff in American history.
The primary cause of this predicament is that more people have been made eligible for, and continue to collect, the federal benefits in question than ever before. As a result of the pandemic and unprecedented new federal benefit programs, recipients of unemployment checks peaked at almost 33 million in June 2020 — more than two and a half times the prior record. Today, despite 10 million job openings and an unemployment rate that has fallen to 5.4 percent, 12 million Americans remain on benefits — a figure that approaches the pre-pandemic record for recipients, set in January 2010 when unemployment was a far-higher 9.8 percent.
About three-quarters of current recipients collect only federal benefits, and thus stand to lose all unemployment checks when temporary federal programs expire on Labor Day. Others will remain eligible for up to 26 weeks of state unemployment checks, but lose a $300-per-week federal supplement.
One of the ironies of the coming cliff is that it was intentional. The Democratic authors of the March 2021 American Rescue Plan that extended benefits through Labor Day insisted on replacing the “soft phaseouts” created in a bipartisan December 2020 law, which would have allowed current recipients to continue collecting benefits for some time after the program closed to new applicants, with a “hard cutoff” that took away all recipients’ benefits at the same time. Why? Because in the bizarre logic of some liberal policymakers, hard cutoffs improve the odds that Congress will approve another extension. The more acute and widespread the pain of a program’s expiration, the malign thinking goes, the greater the political pressure to extend it…
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/08/democrats-stay-silent-as-unprecedented-benefits-cliff-approaches/
Dave, as someone who aligns with the progressive movement on some (but not all) issues, it is time for these benefits to end. Benefits should not discourage people from working, but that is what has happened. Time to adjust the policy.
I agree,
There are plenty of jobs around my way and not just minimum wage jobs either.
Actually I have been surprised at the quality jobs available.
Time to end the federal unemployment subsidy.
I think that the sticking-point is not the if, nor even that much the when, but the how, which is what that AEI/NR columnist, who also thinks that the extra UI benefits have lasted long enough, was discussing.
People might be less reluctant to leave the rolls for gainful employment if they knew there was some kind of cushion while they were starting a job that they might not be able to keep — e.g. for the month’s rent or to put their kids in child care.
If what he says is true — that the cliff was desired, even demanded, by Democrats in order to force an extension — that seems like one more patronizing too-clever-by-half Establishment tactic that failed or backfired.