CARLTON FLETCHER: Watching ‘free money’ tear away the fabric of America

Preaching and a-crying, Tell me that I’m lying, ‘Bout a job that I never could find.

— The Silhouettes

Maybe I shouldn’t be, but as someone whose father always said, “If you work for a man, give that man a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay,” I was astounded when I read restaurateur Austin Newman’s recent Facebook post.

Sure, I’ve heard some small business owners — especially restaurant owners — complain that they couldn’t find people willing to work, but Newman, owner of Austin’s Firegrill in Albany, kind of brought the reality of the situation home to me.

This is what Newman’s post said:

FIREGRILL IS HIRING ALL POSITIONS! Our servers are making $1,200-$2,000 per week in tips! Way more than measly government checks. Qualified Line Cook starting at $14 per hour. We are paying $150 sign-on bonuses also. Please put the word out to anyone willing to get off the couch. Government subsidies are killing our work force.

Everyone, of course, has their take on why Newman, and plenty of others like him, are basically begging people to come to work. But the bottom line, as Newman says in his post, is that as long as our federal government is handing out subsidies for people not to work, they’re not going to work.

(Go ahead and stop the political finger-pointing now: Trump and the Republicans started the huge subsidies in an effort to win elections, and Biden and the Democrats have continued them to try and win over a very divided nation. Yes, the politicians are at fault, but it’s all of them.)

I’ve talked to individuals of all persuasions — black, white, young, old, workers, management — and one thing I’ve learned is true: If a whole lot of people find a way to get paid for doing nothing, most of them are going to do nothing.

I was thinking there for a while — as one person I know told me about “getting the government back” by not returning to a job that was waiting for him because “I can play this out as long as it lasts and get paid almost as much as I was getting for working 40-50 hours a week for just doing nothing. I’m fishing for a living, man, taking life easy for a while” — that I was living in some bizarro world where the people who are rewarded are people who do nothing. The workers who keep on working … they’re getting the shaft … and paying for it as they go.

Sadly, a lot of people — including the one I talked with — have frequently complained about “all these freeloaders I’m helping feed on the welfare rolls,” usually following up with a story about standing in line at the grocery store while some fat woman in front of him/her pays for expensive food items with an EBT card.

So, these people’s response is to leave the employers who hired them and paid them a salary that kept their bills up to date and food on their table, to lower themselves to the ever-decreasing standards that more and more of our country seems willing to accept?

And, those of you who not so subtly told me I had no right to speak on this issue because I didn’t lose my job … stuff that where it’ll do the most good. Every American who is willing to go to his or her job every day and do an honest day’s work has a right to speak about this. Because we all are witnessing the shaming — the deterioration — of the American dream. You know, that old saw about how any man or woman who is willing to put in the work can become anything he or she puts their mind to.

Now, though, because a bunch of politicians are willing to put our kids’ and our grandkids’ future in jeopardy by devaluing our currency — and, in the process, devaluing the work ethic that made America the greatest country in the history of the world — we’re supposed to go along? Who needs an American dream when we’ve got this American political nightmare?

The politicians are saying, “We want to give this special interest group or that special interest group more.” They don’t stop to think that the people who are providing the money to finance those handouts are the stiffs who do go to work every day. And as they grow more disgruntled watching the do-nothings rise to a standard of living they can’t achieve, more and more of them — like the person I talked to — decide it’s OK to just join the masses and collect money you haven’t earned for doing nothing.

Here’s the thing, though. If these able-bodied people — the ones already on the welfare system and the ones who are riding the subsidy train –don’t get off their asses and start filling these job openings that are sitting out there by the hundreds, we’re going to become a welfare state. And that, boys and girls, will be the end of America as we know it.