Waiting in the long rental car line yesterday, I reached my breaking point. Since I had nothing else to do except stare at the back of the head of the person in front of me, I tweeted this:
It was a popular tweet, but I also got this reply:
Wrong, wrong, wrong. First of all, the experiences i had were multitudinous as well as valid. I was not imagining things in all those restaurants, check-in counters, and retail stores. The handful of people who have returned to work are busting their asses, but they simply can’t keep up.
David Stockman, one of the heroes here on Slope, offered up this illustration of the aggregate hours being worked in the leisure/hospitality industry. As you can see, the jobs “growth” is nothing more than a PARTIAL undoing of the shutdown last year. The job market isn’t growing at all. It’s simply partially un-shrinking.
Longer-term, the aggregate hours worked (by a growing population, I would hasten to add) has been in a steady fall for decades now in the true economy, which is the production sector. Simply stated, America is turning into a nation of people who increasingly just sit around and do nothing.
And why would that be? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that the government is promoting being a lard-ass by handing out literally trillions of dollars in exchange for not working. Why would an economically rational person actually work (except maybe for self-respect) and make less money? The Uber driver I took yesterday which cost nearly $40 and was merely 9 minutes in length is the net result of paying people to sit on their gigantic cheeseburger-created asses and watch The Bachelorette on the tee-vee.
So, Christopher Landani, what I decried is, in fact, true. Just get out there and try to get waited on. The key word is going to be “wait.”
