One could say this terrible job market was started by people who got laid off not willing to take the retail and service industry jobs on a temporary basis. If they had that income/employee discounts to hold them over from the start, those retailers wouldn't have lost their customer base.
There's a psychological effect to having employment. A person who makes small monthly wage at JCPenney's isn't going to be afraid to make those purchases on their VISA card. A person who is raking in the food stamps and welfare checks can feel rock bottom in their physcie and choose not to spend.
What utter rot! In the first place the same demand-support you seek to maintain through 'retail and service industry jobs' could just as easily be supported by a reasonable dole.
But the point is that there is no dole in the US! 'Raking in the food stamps and welfare checks'! You have no idea what you're talking about. Food stamps are something like an absurd couple of hundred dollars a month, and are only temporary anyway. As for 'welfare checks', what are you imagining? That the poor can simply receive a check from the government? Christ man, if that were the case we wouldn't have severe recessions. No, 'welfare checks', meager as they are, are only for mothers with very small children.
The reason that people don't spend (support demand) on the ridiculous american version of the dole is not because of any 'psychological effect', but because the dole is about 1/4 of what it needs to be to provide security. People don't spend without security.
Lastly the psychological effect of moving from a 'real job' to working in the serfdom of retail or restaurants would be far more damaging than if we had a proper safety net set up. If workers could say, oh well, my job is gone, but I have a couple of grand a month gauranteed by the state for however long it takes to get a new one', then demand would not suffer.
Yeah, why work in the serfdom of restaurants when one can be a whore, right? What do you think the psyhcological effect of that is?
And I'm curious as to how you can know anything about American welfare, since you've been either rich or in Thailand all your life.
Anyway, productive work is obviously a better way of propping up demand than redistribution.
