Montana Governor Greg Gianforte is ending his state’s participation in the federal program increasing unemployment payments, because he thinks that it makes people too lazy.

Instead, he’s offering a one time limited offer of an “Employment Bonus.”

This is unbelievably and deeply stupid policy, as well as being stupid politically, particularly in a state so lily white (88.54%) that there are virtually no Black people (0.50%) to blame everything on.

I think that his brain has been poisoned by agricultural chemicals used on those famous Montana dental floss farms:

The coronavirus pandemic – heard of it? It’s famously still going on! Though national case numbers are finally starting to drop and recent regional outbreaks in the midwest have begun to subside, there were still about 50,000 new Covid-19 infections recorded in the US on Tuesday and just over 700 new virus-related deaths.

But Greg Gianforte, Montana’s governor, has other priorities: he’s been talking about a “labor shortage” in a cynical attempt to cut public assistance. The Republican governor released a statement on Tuesday announcing his state will stop participating in the federal program that has given unemployed workers additional unemployment payments since the start of the pandemic – in an apparent attempt to get Montanans back to work, and he plans to give those who choose to do so something he calls a “return-to-work bonus”.

………

Although Montana’s unemployment rate fell to 3.8% in April, which is about at pre-pandemic levels, the state’s labor commissioner, Laurie Esau, says its labor force is approximately 10,000 workers smaller than it was pre-lockdown, a drop that Gianforte assumes is to do with lazy people who, given their new found pandemic benefits, don’t want to work any more. And according to Montana department of labor estimates, nearly 25,000 people are currently filing unemployment claims, a good chunk of whom the governor is eager to push into the state’s 14,000 or so job openings.

But this means there aren’t enough job openings for the number of people unemployed; even if the governor’s plan succeeds in filling those vacant positions as intended, there will still be over 10,000 people without jobs to apply for, forced to subsist on less. It is also wildly reductive to assume that because there are fewer people working, it must be the result of a lack of will. People had jobs, and those jobs were taken away, either through mass layoffs or government shutdowns of businesses. That kind of disruption takes time to recover from. People could now be working out childcare arrangements again; finding out where they fit in a new jobs market; or worried about returning to work until the coast is clear.

The headline of this story should be, “Montana Governor has tragically small penis, inflicts pain on whole state to compensate.”

Also, boycott Montana grown dental floss until this policy is reversed.