Thread by @mariliacout

1. There is something stuck on the back of my mind since center-right economists like @paulkrugman started insisting that stimulus checks/universal income were not as important as unemployment benefits: the size of the labor force versus the size of the population.

2. The official employment/unemployment data provided by @BLS_gov the misses the chronically unemployed. This segment is larger than the officially unemployed. Unless the individual officially checks in their job seeking efforts, they are not counted as part of the labor force:

3. That means that they are not counted as unemployed either. Several segments of the population have not been counted for a long time:
- over 50 yrs of age who lost hope of finding a job and live in the secondary/informal economy or marginal employment
bostonfed.org/publications/c…

4. - undocumented people, not restricted to immigrants (~11M immigrant, ~4M American citizens)
- homeless adults (>500K)

5. The number of people eligible for unemployment benefits is ~23M. Compare it to the size of the population (>300M).

6. Yes, more jobs are needed and addressing the needs of the unemployed is critical. However, without universal income, the needs of the long-term unemployed, age discriminated unemployed and "unemployable", which only grow, will not be addressed.

7. These people will either just die (deaths of despair, necropolitics), engage in shadier and shadier types of secondary economy or live at sub-human standards with some kind of insufficient government benefit, with no prospect of integrating the labor force again.

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