Ted Cruz Suggests Servers Don't Deserve An Extra $600 Of Unemployment

Ted Cruz insinuates that restaurant workers are lazy and would rather make money from unemployment benefits

Ted Cruz remains one of the worst people ever. The Republican senator from Texas says democrats are “shoveling cash” at workers who are unemployed due to the pandemic and he also thinks restaurant workers who don’t want to go back to work are lazy, instead of oh, I dunno, scared they’ll contract COVID-19 on the job and die!

Since the pandemic began, the government has provided an extra $600 a week on top of regular unemployment payouts, though that extra amount is set to run out this week. Cruz, for one, does not think the government should reinstate the extra unemployment benefits because he thinks some workers are getting paid more on unemployment and therefore have no incentive to go back to work — which isn’t true, but I’ll get into that in a minute.

“The policy the Democrats and Nancy Pelosi are pushing adds an additional $600 a week,” Cruz said in an interview with CBS’ Face The Nation. “The problem is, for 68% of people receiving it right now, they are being paid more on unemployment than they made in their job.”

“I’ve spoken to small business owners all over the state of Texas who are trying to reopen,” he continued, “and they are calling their waiters and waitresses, they are calling their busboys and they won’t come back. And of course they won’t come back because the federal government is paying them in some instances twice as much money to stay home.”

Couple things going on here. One, if people are making more money on pandemic unemployment than they would at their jobs, the minimum wage is too damn low. Two, people aren’t refusing to go to work because they’re making more money on unemployment, they’re refusing to go back to work because it’s not safe! And three, just because Texas is the lawless Wild Wild West with restaurants open for business, that’s not the case in states with stricter lockdown measures like New York and California — in those states, there aren’t many reopened businesses for workers to return to even if they wanted to. Oh and one more thing, if a business owner calls their employee to offer them their job back and the employee refuses the offer, the owner can then report that employee to their state’s unemployment office and they could potentially lose their benefits, so actually, no Ted Cruz, employees can’t just refuse to go back to work.

The Senate’s newest stimulus package proposal wants to cut the $600 a week benefit to $200 a week, but as the country struggles to contain the virus making it harder for anyone to safely return to any job, we seriously hope senators like Ted Cruz get their shit together.