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Where are all the WORKERS?

Sligh1

Sligh1

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Staff member
Simple question, should be a simple answer but it stumps me….
Before Covid - businesses had “plenty of workers”. Got service, people answered phone, wanted to be hired, etc etc. I am at farm related businesses 2-5x a week. No one even now is fully staffed. “HELP WANTED” all over. Non stop. Stopped by 2 bigger farm/ag companies today…. No parts (which I understand the supply chain issue - GET IT!) but also - no workers. One place stopped Saturday hours since no staff. Another said “sorry for the wait- we are short staffed”. This is everywhere. Even the Casey’s manager by me says “can’t find anyone. Impossible”. Restaurants closed as they can’t get staff. Every industry I’m guessing.

So- folks aren’t scared of Covid & the Covid madness across iowa I would think is over (I was over it the day it was announced but moot point ;) ). Folk’s Gov free funds have to be gone?!?! That PPP $ was gone a year ago. Certainly laborers can’t “not work” after getting $10-30k?!? People still need jobs I would think??!?! Im dumbfounded on this one. Why, 2 years after Covid & the lower income’s $ supply likely needing replenished (just earning a living!!!) - can’t anyone hire people !?!?!?!? Would seem simple & easily explained but I’m stumped!!!
 
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I had this problem even before Covid. I’ve asked the same question. And it seems to be the most able bodied group in 20-30 yr old range. Im wondering how many are going to college and living off school loans hoping our dipshit of a president forgives their loans. Or maybe they are just living in mom and dads basement rent free. Or just alien abductions.
 
I pay close attention to this as I am a small business owner and one of my biggest challenges is staffing, to put it mildly. There are a number of factors bubbling at this time...and I am concerned it will get worse yet, possibly way worse, over the next few years. Things were getting dicey prior to Covid, but the whole overblown Covid response has, and continues to, created much more disturbance than before.

As of 2020, Baby Boomers were still at 71MM people, due to deaths, down from a high of roughly 85MM. As of 2020, GenX was at 65MM and Millenials at 72MM. The "drop" from the BB'ers to the GenX of roughly 20MM people is showing up bigly at this time as the older BB'ers are dying off and the younger BB'ers are/have retired now. BB'ers already were retiring out...but all of the Covid "noise" hastened that even more than what was already happening.

In short, there is a gigantic missing segment of the population in the generational spread...as there are millions fewer GenX'ers to essentially fill the gap that the BB'ers are/have creating. Then...there are way too many shiftless Millenials...but I will save that rant for another time. :)
 
ERA.......Emergency Rental Assistance........will pay your rent, utilities, internet, etc........you can get up to 30/40k. Came out of covid and is still available.

HAF........Homeowner Assistance fund...........Depending on family size you can get up to 40k of your mortgage paid.....Came out of covid and is still available.

Both programs are nation wide............I believe this is the driving factor for lower entry job vacancies.
 
Slick said:
ERA.......Emergency Rental Assistance........will pay your rent, utilities, internet, etc........you can get up to 30/40k. Came out of covid and is still available.

HAF........Homeowner Assistance fund...........Depending on family size you can get up to 40k of your mortgage paid.....Came out of covid and is still available.

Both programs are nation wide............I believe this is the driving factor for lower entry job vacancies.
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This!!

There are still way to many easy ways to get government handouts and the pride of work has gone away. The government has a large group of people right where they want them, fully controlled with handouts.

Sickening but 100% true
 
Windlooker and Slick nailed it. We're experiencing first hand what happens to a civilization when Christian values and the nuclear family are attacked, and Socialism is embraced. There is zero incentive to be productive and bring glory to God.

I can barely take half a day of Sabbath (rest) because I go stir crazy. I know several people like that in my parents and grandparents generations. A few in my generation. And none in the generation(s) younger than me.

There needs to be real threat of starvation for those who don't produce and severe public punishment for those who commit crime.
 
Obsessed said:
Windlooker and Slick nailed it. We're experiencing first hand what happens to a civilization when Christian values and the nuclear family are attacked, and Socialism is embraced. There is zero incentive to be productive and bring glory to God.

I can barely take half a day of Sabbath (rest) because I go stir crazy. I know several people like that in my parents and grandparents generations. A few in my generation. And none in the generation(s) younger than me.

There needs to be real threat of starvation for those who don't produce and severe public punishment for those who commit crime.
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Spot on with starvation comment, all your comments actually.
I farm for a living and believe the day is coming when America will open up the refrigerator door and it will be EMPTY.

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Baby boomers are beginning to pass and majority retire. Baby boomers are a huge population segment, with the following generations consisting of smaller families. Many boomers came from families of 4-8 kids, pretty rare to see families of that size anymore. Means fewer workers. I think covid pushed a lot of folks to early retirement ( i have no facts, just my opinion, along with reading articles and some social media finance pages).

Here is my rant. Government handouts. Again, I have no facts, just my perception is it seems there are more and more government handouts. I got my first job when I turned 16 at Fareway. As a young kid with no real knowledge of money, taxes, government handouts etc I remember learning real quick that something didnt quite seem right how customers could come in and buy all this food with their EBT, WIC (food stamps paid with tax dollars) and then with their own money buy a carton of cigarettes and/or alcohol, while talking on their smartphone and then drive away in their less than 5 year old vehicle. And I'm talking the 'good food' name brand, instead of the fastco store brand items they are buying Heinz, Kraft etc, getting ribeye stakes and a case of mountain dew being paid with by my tax dollars. I remember being 16/17 etc and carrying their groceries out to their car that I paid for so they could go home and sit on their ass and that grinding my gears. While I worked there high school through college there was a another employee maybe 10 years or so older than me that would get all worried if she worked was getting close to 36 or something hours because she couldnt go over on hours or should would lose her housing assistance. She would have to go and tell the manager she couldn't work one of the shifts etc more than once because it put her over her hours to qualify for her benefits. She was literally incentived by the government and knew it to not work and be productive, she would coming out ahead by working less and being paid by the government to do so. I learned there are millions and millions of people in this country that are living life and getting by off the tax payers and people who work. The cord needs to be cut. I understand there are people that truly need help and assitance, but the system is severely abused by many.
 
sep0667 said:
Baby boomers are beginning to pass and majority retire. Baby boomers are a huge population segment, with the following generations consisting of smaller families. Many boomers came from families of 4-8 kids, pretty rare to see families of that size anymore. Means fewer workers. I think covid pushed a lot of folks to early retirement ( i have no facts, just my opinion, along with reading articles and some social media finance pages).

Here is my rant. Government handouts. Again, I have no facts, just my perception is it seems there are more and more government handouts. I got my first job when I turned 16 at Fareway. As a young kid with no real knowledge of money, taxes, government handouts etc I remember learning real quick that something didnt quite seem right how customers could come in and buy all this food with their EBT, WIC (food stamps paid with tax dollars) and then with their own money buy a carton of cigarettes and/or alcohol, while talking on their smartphone and then drive away in their less than 5 year old vehicle. And I'm talking the 'good food' name brand, instead of the fastco store brand items they are buying Heinz, Kraft etc, getting ribeye stakes and a case of mountain dew being paid with by my tax dollars. I remember being 16/17 etc and carrying their groceries out to their car that I paid for so they could go home and sit on their ass and that grinding my gears. While I worked there high school through college there was a another employee maybe 10 years or so older than me that would get all worried if she worked was getting close to 36 or something hours because she couldnt go over on hours or should would lose her housing assistance. She would have to go and tell the manager she couldn't work one of the shifts etc more than once because it put her over her hours to qualify for her benefits. She was literally incentived by the government and knew it to not work and be productive, she would coming out ahead by working less and being paid by the government to do so. I learned there are millions and millions of people in this country that are living life and getting by off the tax payers and people who work. The cord needs to be cut. I understand there are people that truly need help and assitance, but the system is severely abused by many.
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YES!!! There should be ZERO governmental handouts. I mean absolutely ZERO!!! If individuals and organizations want to provide charity, then that's their right, but government should have nothing to do with providing 'assistance'.

I majored in alcohol and girls for a year and a half when I went to college directly out of high school. Soon after I dropped out, I had to start making loan payments. I was so disgusted with myself for having incurred debt that I had absolutely nothing to show for, that I did everything I could to pay it off as quickly as possible. I rented a crappy apartment and worked as much as I could to pay off those loans. I remember watching a news report about a new prison that opened up where the inmates had state of the art everything. Cable television, air conditioning, recreation center, 3 square meals a day, primary and secondary education, etc. I had NONE of those things and thought to myself that, other than the getting raped and killed part... guys in prison were living a better life than I was.

Women are incentivized to continue having more and more illegitimate children!!! The more they have, the more $ they get. They lose $ if they get married. If this isn't an all out assault on the nuclear family, I don't know what is...

I'm all about personally providing assistance where I can, but it comes with stipulations. If I gift you money for food, you better not be spending it on booze and tobacco, etc. If I gift you a place to stay, you better not go out and buy a new car, etc. You've got to be making real progress toward becoming a productive member of society, or else my generosity and charity will go to someone else more deserving.

Government 'entitlement' programs are crippling multiple generations because it just hands out free fish and nobody ever needs to or cares to know how to fish.

People addicted to the governmental 'entitlement' crack pipe are just as much prisoners as those inmates that I saw in the news report years ago, and all by choice.

(After I figured out a ton of things that I didn't want to do, I ended up earning my Associates and Bachelors degrees.)
 
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Daver said:
I pay close attention to this as I am a small business owner and one of my biggest challenges is staffing, to put it mildly. There are a number of factors bubbling at this time...and I am concerned it will get worse yet, possibly way worse, over the next few years. Things were getting dicey prior to Covid, but the whole overblown Covid response has, and continues to, created much more disturbance than before.

As of 2020, Baby Boomers were still at 71MM people, due to deaths, down from a high of roughly 85MM. As of 2020, GenX was at 65MM and Millenials at 72MM. The "drop" from the BB'ers to the GenX of roughly 20MM people is showing up bigly at this time as the older BB'ers are dying off and the younger BB'ers are/have retired now. BB'ers already were retiring out...but all of the Covid "noise" hastened that even more than what was already happening.

In short, there is a gigantic missing segment of the population in the generational spread...as there are millions fewer GenX'ers to essentially fill the gap that the BB'ers are/have creating. Then...there are way too many shiftless Millenials...but I will save that rant for another time. :)
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Interesting, I haven't heard it explained quite like this before. I would think that as the boomers age out that general demand for goods would go down as well , easing the demand for labor.
 
hillrunner said:
Interesting, I haven't heard it explained quite like this before. I would think that as the boomers age out that general demand for goods would go down as well , easing the demand for labor.
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Believe it or not, that was the short description. :) A giant problem that will come to the fore more and more as the demographics continue to morph with the Boomers leaving the workforce is retirement savings, predominantly in the form of pensions and Social Security. Traditional pensions and SS rely on a steady stream of "new" contributors to support the "draws" being taken by the current retired folks.

They are in effect, pyramid schemes...they can only be sustained with enough newcomers to support the retirees. When there are relatively too many takers v. people paying into the system...the system will start gagging and without serious intervention...collapse. This is to say nothing about the roughly 9% of 20-something folks not working and contributing to any form of retirement. (Caveat, those numbers are a few years old now...I suspect it is worse now, with a greater percentage of young people not working and funding SS and other retirement vehicles.
 
Why work when you can get food stamps, lodging, healthcare, monthly checks from the government? Now they may pay their college bills too. The problem is someone has to pay for all this and it's the people actually working for a living who pay taxes. If this country continues to be run by Dems, they will eventually go after 401ks in higher tax withdrawals, higher taxes, and a lot more. Whomever has money, the Dems will need it.
 
There are so many examples of handouts that it is truly unbelievable.

I have a family member who was bringing home 340 a week working. She quit her job because she realized she could work the system and her weekly take home was $700 a week from govt handouts. 35k for doing nothing.

The worst part of it all is that if changes are not made to address this mentality it will eventually milk the middle class dry as we pay for it, and more and more will become dependent on handouts to survive.
 
Daver said:
Believe it or not, that was the short description. :) A giant problem that will come to the fore more and more as the demographics continue to morph with the Boomers leaving the workforce is retirement savings, predominantly in the form of pensions and Social Security. Traditional pensions and SS rely on a steady stream of "new" contributors to support the "draws" being taken by the current retired folks.

They are in effect, pyramid schemes...they can only be sustained with enough newcomers to support the retirees. When there are relatively too many takers v. people paying into the system...the system will start gagging and without serious intervention...collapse. This is to say nothing about the roughly 9% of 20-something folks not working and contributing to any form of retirement. (Caveat, those numbers are a few years old now...I suspect it is worse now, with a greater percentage of young people not working and funding SS and other retirement vehicles.
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Pyramid scheme is exactly what I've called the push to continue to grow the population in order to take care of the previous generation. At some point, you just can't put any more people here and the whole thing comes crashing down. That's a band aid that's going to be ripped off at some point.
 
Copenhagen Tob said:
Why do I constantly hear that social security will run out, but never a shortage of welfare to come
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Because welfare handouts guarantee democratic votes, because who says no to Santa Clause... And because people drawing from SS are at the end of their voting life cycle and have usually widened up and become conservative along the way.
 
Thank goodness for all of the immigrants streaming across the southern border, need new people to tax. LOL


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