Fox News anchor: Expiring unemployment benefits might cause people to “actually go back to work”
Despite coronavirus pandemic, Melissa Francis says: “And the economy may get better as a result”
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From the July 31, 2020, edition of Fox News’ Outnumbered
MELISSA FRANCIS (ANCHOR): Chris, you know, rejecting this, it might backfire on the Democrats. Not just because they look heartless, saying, “No, we're not going to — we're going to allow this to run out, rather than doing the extension,” but people may actually go back to work, and the economy may get better as a result.
CHRIS BEDFORD (SENIOR EDITOR, THE FEDERALIST): And I sure hope people get back to work soon. I just got off the phone with a friend of mine who's got a restaurant in D.C. He said it's more expensive for him to be open right now, with all the restrictions, than it is for him to just remain closed. He wants to keep his employees on staff. Restaurants at my parents' town in Cape Cod can't even hire waiters, because it's typically more — it pays better to stay home than it does to come in and actually put yourself at a little bit of risk to come to work.
But at the bottom, at the end of the day, if you were making less than $40,000 a year in April or May, you had an almost 50% chance, a 40% chance, of losing your job. Everyone who's watching knows that, because either they've lost their job, or their friends or their neighbors or their children or their parents have lost their job. This is no time to submit your Christmas wish list, like Nancy Pelosi is doing, and say, “I want all of these things in order to help this.”
I think at the end of the day, though, this is going to go down as such an example of unbelievable hubris that we could print money and print our way out of this, while the entire economy just shuts down. People need to get back to work, need to go out, they need to not be run by fear.