One of the things that led me away from the Republican party forever was its descent into madness – punctuated by a fiendish adaptation of cruelty and selfishness. What I could not abide, as one who actually has made a study of economics, is the way they blithely dismissed the steps of economic progress the world has made since the agony of the 2nd World War. What made me even madder was seeing the outright hypocrisy of people who benefitted immensely from government help being hell-bent on denying others even the slightest bit of help. Even as it was clear that it was something that was going to benefit them in the long term via the route of having more people become self-sufficient.

Just as a lot of people thought of themselves as epidemiologists last year, seeking ways to justify insane behavior during a global pandemic, so too this year there are hundreds of armchair economists – who don’t know the first thing about macroeconomics – doing so only for the reason listed above, to justify cruelty and selfishness and the normalization of unacceptable behavior in the 21st century.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4 million Americans quit their jobs in July 2021. Resignations peaked in April and have remained abnormally high for the last several months, with a record-breaking 10.9 million open positions at the end of July. In the meantime, businesses are whining about increasing wages in what has become a tight labor market – doing as they often do, blaming people for wanting to have better for themselves. The popular explanation is twofold: 1) Government benefits – which have expired for everyone ( except wealthy corporations) disincentivized going to work, and 2) The American worker is fundamentally lazy. Neither of these explanations is true, but among a particular set of voters, the explanations are still heard almost daily.

In a Twitter thread today, Kurt Eichenwald, an award-winning journalist who has written for the New York Times, Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and several other publications, laid out a relatively detailed explanation of the factors driving the exodus from the workforce and that the blame – if you wish to call it that – lies squarely on the side of those who allowed corporate greed to go unchecked.

https://twitter.com/kurteichenwald/status/1455289213860159492?s=20

It’s an excellent thread, and because Twitter threads can be notoriously hard to read, broken down into individual tweets, I have transcribed the entire thread below. What follows are his words, not mine, and after it finishes, I will add a few summary comments of my own.

QUOTED TEXT FOLLOWS:

“The Great Resignation” is not about people not wanting to work. It is about a dawning recognition that, for a larger and larger portion of this country, the American dream is dead, and with it, the inspiration of working toward a better future for oneself. Instead, work becomes not the means towards reaching an aspiration – a spouse, children, a home, vacations, personal growth, a retirement. Instead, the greed culture has turned work for millions into just a means of survival, with wages stagnant, healthcare unaffordable, insurance, treated as a luxury, paid free time an impossibility, children unaffordable, homes a dream.

Yes, work is important – but not without the promise of a future. Many young people see nothing but 40 years of the same, further enriching the obscenely rich. This system has taught people how to survive without because they don’t believe they will ever have. If they reasonably don’t believe they will ever be able to afford a house or to raise children, and never will have group insurance or a paid vacation, and can make it living with their parents, and have already been taught by McResources (a real thing) and Walmart how to apply for Food Stamps and Medicaid because those multibillion-dollar corporations know they don’t pay enough for their employees to survive and are already getting those benefits and have the choice of just saying “forget it, I’m going to work on my painting or sewing or whatever, I am tired of being abused by my supervisor, I am tired of being screamed at by customers for things out of my control, I am tired of watching adults throw temper tantrums and then being bawled out by my company because I could have handled it better. I can survive without all of this. I can be happier without all of this. I am paid so little, my life won’t be that different.” THAT is why we have the Great Resignation.

Because we, the Boomers, have endlessly sucked up the capital that could go down to the younger generations to enrich ourselves, then pushed down the debt. Entry-level jobs that can be done with a high school education now demand college degrees, PLUS unpaid internship experience. So, to do almost anything with the possibility of a future, younger generations have to go to college. But to do it, they have to load up on debt. Then we sneer at them when they talk about how their terrible wages and horrible debt make home-buying etc., impossible.

Oh sure, the children of the rich are fine. And their parents sneer, “maybe stop buying avocado toast,” as if a single pleasure in life equals the cost of a home. All of this starts and stops with greed and corporations. Pay more, and stop pulling up the ladder. Not all jobs need college degrees; many years ago, I interviewed Bill Clark, then the National Security Advisor under Reagan. After the interview, I asked him some background and asked what college he got his degree from. Sheepishly, he said he didn’t. Only had a high school degree. That’s the 1980s – the National Security Advisor for the President of the United States had only a high school education. But I will bet anything, to be the social media voice at Wendy’s, no matter how funny you are, you have to be a college graduate with internships in social media, etc etc.

Not all jobs need college degrees. Companies need to stop requiring them for jobs that don’t. And they need to start paying fair wages. And treating people like human beings. People never wanted to “work.” They wanted to invest their effort toward living a better life. And if work doesn’t do that, if work merely makes life worse to people who have been taught how to survive without wages so that McDonald’s and Walmart et al can shift their wage costs onto taxpayers, then a Great Resignation was inevitable.

END OF QUOTED TEXT

Although the signs were there all through the late ’80s and early ’90s, the simple truth is that most Americans did not understand the grave damage the concept of trickle-down economics was doing to the quality of life for most Americans. The process accelerated in the 2000s but was ignored in great part by the wreckage of the forever wars George W. Bush foolishly embarked upon. The financial crisis of 2008 brought it painfully in front of our faces, but even then, a lot of the corrective measures needed were not taken because the astroturf movement of the teabaggers was busy placing blame anywhere but where it belonged. It was more fun for them to blame the black guy.

Then along came Donald Trump – and he brought something new to the table. He stopped trying to find reasons for the decline and just stood up and was blatantly and unapologetically corrupt. He did not even try to find a reasonable explanation for the problems he was creating; he just lied and said they were not happening. And as we now know, a boatload of people were fine being lied to by a psychopath and a traitor to the Republic. Facts and the basis of economics no longer mattered. Furthermore, as companies bowed down to the altar of Milton Friedman, claiming “shareholder value” (read stock price) was the only thing that mattered economically, they literally got away with murder during the pandemic.

“John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

― Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

So now, here we are. Finally, maybe folks are waking up that the displacement is permanent – because the rich and the politicians in this country ( yes, that’s you, Mitch McConnell) want it precisely that way.

And it’s the American people as a whole – minus the top 10% – who are paying a heavier and heavier price.

Here are a couple of other facts worth noticing:

1. Resignation rates are highest among mid-career employees. So it’s not Gen Z “slackers”; it’s Gen X and Millenials who are quite simply getting burned out by the career treadmill.

It’s also possible that many of these mid-level employees may have delayed transitioning out of their roles due to the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, meaning that the boost we’ve seen over the last several months could be the result of more than a year’s worth of pent-up resignations.

And of course, many of these workers may have simply reached a breaking point after months and months of high workloads, hiring freezes, and other pressures, causing them to rethink their work and life goals.

I think it’s the latter -enabled by the former.



2. Resignations are highest in the tech and health care industries. Again, these are not people who “chose the wrong major” in college. These are trained folks who know they have transferable skills. In general, resignation rates were higher among employees who worked in fields that had experienced extreme increases in demand due to the pandemic, likely leading to increased workloads and burnout.

They are feeling pretty fucking unappreciated.

Especially when guys like this one and others experienced a three-fold increase in their wealth over the last two years:

Like it or not, the United States is failing miserably in the most critical benchmark of a prosperous nation – how well it takes care of its citizens. And despite the whining from the tea sniffers, the money is in the economy to do better.

And of course the usual suspects will rise up to tell me I am wrong – America is the greatest country in the world, that is why so many people are trying to come here.

Except, I am not wrong, the numbers support my contention. Just look at wealth inequality ratios, total money flow rates, and OECD benchmarks on economic progress. The United States is declining, whether you like it or not.

The trend can be arrested, but the window of opportunity to do so is running out – particularly in light of the ever increasing climate crises as well as the inability of a majority of Americans to see real growth in wages and living conditions.

One final note – the current political division in this country is stoking the fires of those who have had it with lack of opportunity. Our red hat brethren think its only them who feel that rage – but that too, is not true. The younger generations are noticing. And their patience is wearing thin.

We deserved better.