The hesitancy to strongly encourage people to get vaccinated with a few sticks in addition to the carrots has been a terrible mistake. The whole "nudge" philosophy seems to boil down to, "you can't fucking tell whiny white people what to do, so don't even try," instead of actually, you know, nudging people to do things in an effective manner.
An obvious one was requiring vaccines to fly. Easy to implement relative to anything else. No reason not to do it.
And, of course, the expiring unemployment benefits. Some real psycho-brain shit on that.
Privately, some administration officials have expressed openness to the idea that economic research will eventually show that the benefits had some sort of chilling effect on workers’ decision to take jobs. Critics of the extra unemployment benefits have argued that they are discouraging people from returning to work at a time when there are a record number of job openings and many businesses are struggling to hire.With any luck, our biggest asshole bad faith critics will be proved fucking right!
For some reason it's always the psychos with the bad advice who keep their jobs, too. Nobody could have predicted!!!
"We got this!" was the Obama line, as they repeatedly, consistently, didn't. Green shoots, baby!
Maybe it'll all be fine, but how about, just once, erring on the side of doing too much?