As if getting laid off isn’t scary enough, as if getting put through the unemployment wringer isn’t humiliating and frustrating enough, Gov. Ron DeSantis has decided to start blaming the jobless for the state’s failure to pay benefits.
In other words, the governor thinks the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of people who still haven’t received unemployment benefits to pay for rent and food have only themselves to blame.
And DeSantis had been in office barely a year when the economy collapsed, producing an unprecedented number of claims (not that we think fixing the system would have ever been a priority for the governor without the prompting of a pandemic).
According to the state’s own dashboard, 1.37 million people have applied for unemployment, and the state has paid nearly 780,000 of those, a little more than half.
What’s mystifying is how DeSantis, knowing better than anyone how lousy and glitchy the state’s system is, can be so confident those people truly are not eligible.
