In March 2020, Heather Thomas opened a franchise of Your CBD Store in Mattoon, IL. She'd spent the months before the opening working 12+ hour days setting up the store in preparation for the opening. When she did open, thanks to a prime location in Mattoon's downtown, she was doing up to $4,000 a week in business and had hired one part-time worker.
Then COVID hit, and Governor J.B. Pritzker shuttered businesses. Thanks to the newness of her business, Thomas didn't qualify for any SBA loans and she shuttered her business.
In an article for Bankrate, Thomas said, 'It took a lot of time to get everything organized, but it seemed like it only took 15 minutes to tear everything down.'
Thomas is just one of many such stories. The same article notes that 100,000 small businesses didn't make it through the pandemic, with three of five businesses that were forced to shut down for 'safety' never reopened.
Unemployment spiked to 14.8% thanks to the government deciding who was and wasn't an 'essential worker.'
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Most of us got $1,200 and a pat on the back.
So it's very hard to feel sympathy for sob pieces like this:
DOGE-led mass firings of federal employees are tearing at the promise of job security that's come with government work for more than a century.
Why it matters: Millions of federal workers are now feeling the same kind of job anxiety more familiar to those in corporate America, including the tech sector, where Elon Musk's firing playbook is far more common.
What they're saying: 'This is not the same government it was a month ago,' a longtime federal employee told Axios, requesting anonymity because they've accepted the administration's 'deferred resignation' offer and don't want to jeopardize it.
- 'The mentality that federal workers have — that their jobs are protected — none of that exists anymore,' they said.
Why is it that federal workers have such sacrosanct job security when almost no other person does? This writer has been laid off from nursing jobs, but there are no sob stories in Axios about the plight of such employees.
And why is it these workers are invariably like this?
Is there an essential need for collecting data on sexual orientation? I don't think so.
When Joe Biden canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline, some 11,000 workers were left without jobs. At the stroke of a pen and in the name of 'climate change' (a wholly politicized, unscientific agenda).
Two former Keystone pipeline workers said they have not found work in the two months since President Biden suspended construction on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and are not interested in finding work under his upcoming $3 trillion dollar green infrastructure plan.
Laid off pipeline welder Lynn Allen and retired pipeline worker Guy Williams talked about the situation on 'Fox & Friends First' Monday.
'You think about it every minute of every day,' Allen told the program about finding work. 'There’s nothing out there.'
Allen said he doesn’t want work under the president’s new plan to provide 'high paying union jobs' to address climate change and build roads and bridges.
Forgive me if I find the work of pipeline employees more beneficial to society than a woman who asks people who they prefer to sleep with.
But while the grad student gets sympathy, remember what the pipeline workers got from the Biden administration and journalist class: They were told 'learn to code', just like every other person laid off by Leftists who didn't like the industry those people worked for.
In Texas, salon owner Shelley Luther wanted to keep food on her table and pay her bills, so she defied lockdowns and kept her doors open. Luther was arrested. A judge tried to force Luther to apologize for being 'selfish', and sentenced her to a week in prison.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a massive $20-an-hour minimum wage increase into law in March 2024. As predicted by everyone who doesn't have a (D) after his or her name, the cost of things went up, worker hours were slashed, and California businesses shut their doors, like Rubio's Coastal Grill, which closed almost 50 locations in the state.
Panera Bread was insulated from these problems, of course, because Newsom is allies with Greg Flynn, who owns dozens of Panera locations. They were exempted from the minimum wage increase.
Yay, equality.
Or something.
The COVID lockdowns were done in the name of 'safety' -- the Left lectured us that we had to keep people out of work and at home so the virus wouldn't spread.
'Two weeks to flatten the curve' and all that.
The point is: all the Left has to do to ruin your life and livelihood is declare a public emergency, and all bets are off. It's terrible public policy and an even worse precedent.
In the same vein, the minimum wage increase was a matter of 'fairness' and addressing 'corporate greed', neither of which should drive policy decisions, either.
So, we should frame DOGE's dismissal of vast swaths of federal employees in the same manner. We are $36 trillion in debt, and that goes up by $1 trillion every three months. Staving off the inevitable economic collapse that will occur if we remain on this trajectory sure sounds like a public emergency to me.
In the name of fairness and equity, federal employees should have to live and work under the same rules they gladly enforce on the rest of us.
And if all else fails they, too, can learn to code.
