Who is saying CERB is a disincentive to work and what is the outcome of removing CERB?
By: Ww Winter
Tags: Cerb, Covid Diaries, Pandemic Diaries, Trudeau, Working In Canada

Who is saying CERB is a disincentive to work and what is the outcome of removing CERB? WW Winter Jul 20, 2020·3 min read

What is the goal of this person or group of persons in removing CERB?

What has kept people away from work?

Is it CERB or is it the pandemic?

CERB is the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit. CEWS is the Canadian Emergency Wage Subsidy. The first is paid to individuals by the government. The second is paid to businesses by the government.

To blame the CERB for not having more unemployed people is like blaming the not-working-in-a-paid-job-female for being the one to have a pregnancy. In this case, a pregnancy is a natural consequence of sex between humans who want to have a child. Unemployment in a pandemic is a natural consequence of risk avoidance by business (avoiding the expense of paying salaries). If removing the CERB from individuals and giving it to the business is meant to change the effects of the pandemic, then we should have seen business doing the most to qualify for the subsidies already existing. However, the reception was lukewarm. So the government is sweetening the pot. Does this sound like something we’ve seen before? Perhaps these businesses were shaky even before the pandemic and the pandemic was just a fast-forward function in this reality show we’re all part of.

Obviously, there is no need for this by the business in the first version of CEWS as shown by the low actual use of this fund, and I suspect, even of the second version.

If the social experiment is to provide incentives to business, how about something that does not cost money today? How about tax credits for businesses that increase their full-time headcount?

Obviously, you want to fund business that will survive to pay taxes eventually. You’re not funding business just to survive another month and then go bankrupt the next. If you didn’t care if the business goes bankrupt, then it would be a bad solution because a bankrupt business means laid off employees, which brings you back to the original problem.

I’m wondering in what situation CERB is worse than CEWS if the goal is to keep people safe and employed.

Is it the “economy” that’s more important than people? Who is the economy, by the way? Isn’t it people, too? Isn’t it the same person that’s currently unemployed?

The people who are not working in paid jobs are contributing to the “economy” because the bread, utilities, and even the seeds for planting are bought and paid for within the economy.

In fact, I would argue that people not working in paid jobs are contributing more to the economy than they are getting out of it. These individuals still require the same utilities and calories to live and yet they don’t get the wages to about their days. If you think about it each person contributes the same to the earth each day: all the carbon dioxide exhaled into the environment, and all the other excretions in a day goes back to the earth, and at death, molecules to the earth: mostly carbon. These same molecules that have existed for billions of years that have formed part of stars, oceans, some other person in history, consumed food, and in the future, would be part of other stars, oceans, persons, and consumer food. What is the difference?

Is it the one year in 15 billion years that was spent working to earn wages in a paid job that is subject to a wage subsidy?

In the extreme situation imagined to justify removal of CERB where paid jobs are available to everyone who seeks them (which has not been the case for a few years now, as shown by the presence of many overcrowded employment agencies funded by the government whose sole mission is to help people find employment): If a person refuses to work, just as if a person refuses to have a pregnancy in my earlier example, is the consequence of that denial of basic income or denial of societal inclusion? With a denial of basic income, the person would eventually die.