Is it sinful to receive "free" money when a job is available?

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Or I have seen both sides and had folks say, why should I go back to work when I am making more on unemployment, no other reason given.

They just want to know how much tax if any they should have withheld or hold onto for the benefits they receive. Most, if they don’t have it withheld will not have it a year from now when taxes are due.
 
What do you hope to accomplish by reiterating a truism? One size never fits all, which was kind of my point from the beginning.
 
I don’t hope to accomplish anything, other than understanding why some feel that it is acceptable to receive payment from the gov. when for no other reason they could be earning their own way.

That when given the opportunity to return to work, it is now acceptable to simply stay home and draw a check against our great grandchildren’s (maybe by then) repayment of the debt.

That as long as it is legal to do so, there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

That since the Church doesn’t specifically address the issue, it doesn’t fall under theft or greed. Which I certainly disagree with. It certainly is immoral in my view.
 
I wonder what a red flag with the stars and stripes in the upper corner would look like.

I did find a pretty cool looking one like the 13 colonies flag, with a hammer and sickle inside of the 13 star ring.
 
Some of these folks aren’t returning to the same job they were furloughed from.

I am looking at the big picture.

There seems to be a whole lot of reasons being given for the current, what might end up being, status quo.
 
farronwolf said:
theft
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We’ve established it’s not theft if the person is following the rules for the unemployment and it is not lying if the person is being truthful.
farronwolf said:
greed
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No one is getting rich off of unemployment payments.

This is, again, an assumption on your part. Ascribing motives to people.

If the person has weighed the situation and determined returning to work is not economically feasible, the risk is too high, and the unemployment compensation is better for their family in that situation that is not greed.
It may be that the person is exercising prudence and care for their family.
 
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Unemployment is a benefit that you pay into and have access to when you need it. Not sure why you think there’s a problem with insurance claims. People are understandably hesitant to risk their health for a few dollars when they can earn more staying at home. If employers want workers they can always entice people by offering to pay more.
 
farronwolf said:
However, there is a segment of the population that even when offered a job after being laid off or furloughed simply won’t take it right now.
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farronwolf said:
In my view these are sinful actions.
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I think this is between them and their maker. You cannot possibly know whether or not each person is “validly” unemployed or not. Some may simply be opting for a cautious approach of avoiding human contact even after restrictions are lifted. This is a prudential judgment, not a sinful action.

I’m not sure if I can stomach one more people-who-sin-differently-than-I-do thread, so I’ll bow out of this one.
 
I’ve often found that people who complain about the lack of availability of labor are actually complaining about the price of labor (i.e., the wage).

Working in the new environment entails a significantly higher risk. One of my friends works for a chain of grocery stores, and six of her coworkers have already died from the virus.

Generally, if you are asked to work in a risky environment, you are compensated for that risk, and the compensation is quite generous.

What the government has done with the stimulus money is effectively ensure that if someone wants to hire a worker, they must compensate them for that risk by outbidding the government’s offer of unemployment insurance + $600/week.

That hardly seems like a princely sum to pay someone to accept a non-trivial risk of death.

So if your customers are having a hard time hiring workers, it’s not that those workers are unwilling to work. It’s that they are unwilling to work at the salary they are being offered. There is certainly some salary at which they would choose to work rather than collect unemployment.

Your customers are clearly not willing to pay that, otherwise they wouldn’t have this problem.

So we could just as easily turn the question around. Is it sinful for employers to demand their workers receive the same wages as before, even if they are now incurring a substantially higher risk on the job?

Personally, I wouldn’t judge either one to be sinful. They’re economic decisions. The employers aren’t willing to offer a wage that will incentivize people to work for them, and the employees aren’t willing to work for wages they consider inadequate given the risk they are incurring. There’s nothing sinful about that.

In economic transactions, one or both parties always has the right to decline the deal, and walk away.
 
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goout said:
It’s a sin against justice to take things that don’t belong to you or things that are not due to you…
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If the government determines a payment is due to you, whether it seems just or not, it does not belong to you and due to you.
phil19034 said:
My point was simply: when you give people free money, they lose their motivation to work for it.
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Not necessarily. When given a little bit of free money, a person can still aspire for more. Sometimes the free money enables them to do something that is a stepping stone to that something more, like get an education or other training, or even open a business. Just look at rich people. They never seem to lose their motivation to work for even more.

This question is for everybody:

As a hypothetical, suppose you discovered a bag of gold buried in your lawn. You didn’t know it was there. Nobody did. No one knows where it came from or who it might properly belong to. But you have it now. I pose the following question: Is it sinful to “receive” this bag of gold and use it for your own when you were doing OK before you found the gold?

I suggest the answer is “no”. It is not sinful. I further suggest that the moral question posed by the OP is equivalent to this one. Therefore the answer to the OP question is also “no.”

One could extend this analogy even further. Suppose that instead of finding a bag of gold, one of the stocks you held just happened to take off for reasons you did not predict. You find your stock is now worth 50 times what you paid for it. It is like “found” gold, or “free money from the government” in that you did nothing special to get it. Of course it is not sinful to claim this gain as your own, which further reinforces the assessment of the OP question.
 
Are you referring to whether or not unemployment benefits are taxable.

That is different than who pays the taxes into the unemployment fund. Maybe you misread what we were speaking of.
 
So if an employee had been working for a company, say in the industrial maintenance industry for some time previously at a rate of pay and then all the sudden they wont come to work. Wont answer ther phone when the employer calls, all of the sudden the employer is paying too little for the job.

I am not in disagreement that certain persons should get, if you want to call it hazard pay during this time. Employers like grocery stores if they applied for PPP certainly have the funds to do that right now. For the industries who got PPP and are not at full operation and are using the funds to continue payroll instead of laying employees off and having them draw unemployment have no need to pay hazard pay.
 
You realize if employees lost their jobs en masse it could be a death knell for a capitalist economy, right?
 
Um no finding a bag of gold on a property that you own is not the same as applying for unemployment compensation and receiving a check weekly from the gov. Especially if your current job was offered to you and you refuse to go back.

Making a gain on a stock has absolutely nothing to do with my question. To equate drawing unemployment to making investments is, well I dont know what to call it but certainly not analogous.

A closer analogy would be to go to the food bank line to get food when you have plenty in your cupboard. It isnt breaking any rule. Not certain if the Church says this is wrong or not but it certainly is.
 
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Those calculations apply even apart from any believe that you’d suffer some hazard from returning to work. I would struggle to accept a pay cut for the privilege of working, even though there’s practically no chance that I’d be in any danger or put any of my family members in any danger. I hate not working, but you might be able to pay me enough to do it… ;/
 
It kind of puts the average person in a bind too. Do you ignore the incentives, and continue as before? Or, knowing that you will be paying for it, do you try to capture some of the benefits? Seems like a grey zone to me.
 
I mean, one can still work. You just can’t be officially, formally paid for the work you do, if you want to be paid for not doing it… Government is screwed up.
 
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