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Trump threatens to pull unemployment benefits from all states for the first time in history
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
329 points (99.1% liked)
politics
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Trump and the Republicans want to kill poor people.
& they are succeeding, worldwide
And you know what happens? This makes the next group of people, i.e. middle class, the next poors! Guess what they want to do to the new poors?
Who do they think the rich will live off of then?
Or maybe they haven’t thought that far ahead.
They don't want to kill the poor, but they don't care if they die. What they want are tons of poor, desperate voters and workers.
What they want is riots so they can declare martial law and hold power indefinitely, Because people are still upset about martial law being declared so “antifa” must be out there still
The Republicans have never cared if the poor die. That's a basic part of their ideology.
This is different though. Starting with DOGE and continuing unabated since, Trump and his Republican lackeys (and his fascist handlers) have clearly deliberately gone out of their way to arrange things not so that poor people might die but so that they will die.
Which is exactly what will be left over after they kill off as many "undesirables" as possible.
Don't forget, he's also very stupid, and I honestly believe the narcisist thinks things are going really great right now, he just can't find a way to get the numbers to agree with him. Sadly, on a purely metric issue this might be a winning play. Unemployment numbers are counted based on how many people are collecting unemployment. Kick people off unemployment = they don't count as unemployed. In his narcisism he might actually believe that "fake unemployed people are making the job numbers worse". Secondly jobs numbers themselves. Take away unemployment, people will work shittier jobs that might delay homelessness, or possibly get food when they are homeless.
Unemployment insurance claims aren’t used to measure the unemployment rate in the US. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump thinks they are… Nor would I be surprised if he tries (or is trying) to change the measure so that it is based on unemployment claims.
To be clear I’m not saying the US’s unemployment numbers are good—they are distorted to make the unemployment number look smaller than it is. One issue is that People must be actively looking for work to be considered “unemployed”, otherwise they aren’t part of the “labor force” and don’t count at all. It doesn’t matter if they are capable of work, want to work, and spent a year straight looking for work; if they aren’t actively looking now, they don’t count. Additionally, if a person is doing any work at all—even a few hours a week at minimum wage, or doing a bit of unpaid work for a family business—they are considered an employed member of the labor force. It doesn’t matter if they are broke, homeless, and desperately looking for a job; they count as an employed member of the labor force.
Interesting, but yeah I guess that still counts in the sense that still it's pushing say, software engineers that lost their jobs to AI, to absolutely have to take a minimum wage job to, possibly afford enough food to survive while getting evicted/foreclosed etc...
No matter how you slice it, it still does put more people... into a rush to get SOME form of employment. even at the cost of their time that they could be using to get... actually livable employment.
blue collar worker looks up
"Homie, you think we have jobs for y'all?"
Hmm...
Yes - this is true. And it's essentially 100% guaranted that unemployment, measured honestly, is going nowhere but up.
And with the midterms coming up...
Yes - this seems more likely to be the primary motivation.
It's the financial version of "if we stop counting COVID deaths, the numbers will go down"
"Make poor people their slaves" Yes
They also think that they will save money by letting people get poorer. Moving everyone a step down won’t have that effect.