Created using the Always Sunny Title Card Generator, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76020668

You may be wondering how it is that the wannabe-ubermenschen of US fiscal policy could be making such piss poor calculations in the allotment of our daily (or in this case weekly) bread, but their cluelessness actually makes perfect sense: it turns out that when you lead a life devoted to financially deifying yourself, you tend to lose touch with a few basic tenets of human rationality.

Tenet number one: you do what you can to make the best of bad situations, which for millions of Americans are unceasing 40 hour work week cycles for less than a living wage for life.

Tenet number two: you take pains to comply with the wishes of your bosses (plural, obviously) because they are the anthropomorphized spigots for your means of survival, which includes those damn-near exclusive tokens for free access (plus copay) to life-giving technologies that were developed by human beings invariably to help human beings.

Here’s one great example of a desperately submissive pain you or someone you care about might be taking right now: working outside the safety of home in a Global Pandemic.

Now regarding the 27.7 Million stated in the title: you should know that it comes from the most amateur methodology available. But more importantly it’s a method just as sophisticated as manna calculations being done by the god-tier’s financial wizards’ guild on what is portrayed to be our behalf.

This is how the current unemployment “sweetener” was calculated: take the average nationwide weekly income of about $970 and subtract the average nationwide unemployment benefit of about $370, and you get the universal bonus payout of $600.

Rationality tenet number three: $600 a week plus anything for doing nothing is the closest most of us will ever come to paradise. Giving out that kind of money temporarily is like giving prisoners a three month break from their shackles.

[Some foreshadowing: Among the top ten bullet points of every competent high school world history class is this lesson: revolutions happen when people are given a sample of something better, a respite from the everlasting yoke, and then that something better is withdrawn, and the yolk is tossed back in place, and for the first time its weight is felt against the weight of its absence.]

In 2018 the Bureau of Labor Statistics said that 49–62 million workers were considered essential, or 34 to 43% of the US total workforce. With that in mind I googled this NPR article from 2010 that said $50,000 was about the median annual income for Americans, which was close enough to $970 a week to make this piece easy enough to write.

So my math: take the median number of essential workers and divide it in half for a ballpark of how many Americans are getting fucked right now.

Let’s pretend half of those can work from home (it’s really less) and that still leaves 13.8 million Space Monkeys strapping on their PPE for drive-thru detail at a time when staying safe in bed pays more.

At least this is the kind of attentive and faithful behavior that the god-class expects from Space Monkeys (as long as all the commercials just keep calling them heroes).

But the gods can’t see the repercussions of what they’re doing. Their everlasting practice of deliberate inattention has blinded them. They haven’t considered the vast overlap of what’s essential and what’s shit-tier, that is to say all the stuff that needs doing and most of us can do but nobody wants to. The gods in their plotting have forgotten the rationality of the Charlie-workers.

They don’t understand what’s happening in the mind of an essential custodian who has to show up to replace the urinal cakes that you keep deliberately aiming your latent-COVID piss at (probably not a thing) and thereby dissolving it at a faster rate, when the government is handing out $600 to stay home. They don’t get the entirely new and unique stress of daily labor in a dangerous environment while everyone above your caste tweets their musings on the tragedy of being (paid and) stuck inside.

But of course this would happen. How could celestial beings ever imagine the world from a shit-tier perspective?

The problem comes down to this: paying someone $600 more than you for a job is saying their work is more important than yours, but paying someone $600 more for nothing is saying they are more important than you, and that’s deeply, unacceptably unAmerican.

Full disclosure: the author is a Space Monkey.

Charlie-workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but COVID exposure.