716
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
716 points (99.2% liked)
politics
30937 readers
1967 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles. Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to US politics and contain quality and original content. Social Media adjacent hosts like Substack are allowed, but ONLY if they tie back to a company/subsidiary. No personal or friend group blogs and no self-promotion. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and re-hosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing other users of being bots or paid actors.
- No memes, trolling, misinformation, or low-effort posts/comments (including reposts). If you see posts like this that anger you, do not engage. Report, block, and live a happier life than they do. Any slap-fight is subject to comment removals. Fights full of rule violations will result in temporary bans to cool off.
- No manipulating votes via bots or alt accounts; this will result in permanent bans. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in an account ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be permanently banned.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules and use critical thinking when reading, posting, and commenting. Users that repeatedly have comments or posts removed, weaponize reports, or violate the code of conduct, will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. The reason(s) behind moderator action(s) are publicly available through the Modlog.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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?"
There's a republican solution for that as well... "lower/eliminate minimum wage so corporations can hire people to do things that are less useful". Think of it, we can pay people $2 an hour to have them stand in a park and tell people they should eat at mcdonalds, normally the conversion rate is too low, but at $2 an hour, if they can get one person to go every 2 hours, it's still profitable.
(and yes obviously this is horribly terrifyingly stupid... and honestly not that far from what many horrible politicians have pushed for).