So Congress is looking to extend the unemployment benefits for those people whose employment have been adversely affected by COVID-19 through no fault of their own. And I applaud that to a certain degree. The lingering question that I have is this. How many of these people are taking an extended vacation — whether outdoors or on Netflix — while much of the rest of the population that is employed has been re-skilling just to figure out how to work from home or whatever hybrid model that their companies are employing?
In other words, it still comes back to this question – how many unemployed people are taking advantage of this downtime to re-skill (or up-skill)? And should we be monitoring this and perhaps making this a condition for continued unemployment benefits? This seems to be a reasonable middleground that was never fully explored with all of the welfare reform arguments over the past several decades.
With digital distribution, there’s almost no excuse. It is cheap, ubiquitous, and completely necessary to improve the capabilities of our society.
Let's help our fellow citizens financially now AND the future.