The state of Missouri is what's known as a Republican trifecta. The Republicans
hold the governor's seat. They hold the state house. They hold the state Senate. Republicans
control the state of Missouri and the reason that's important to what I'm about to tell you
is because I wanna preface this by saying the Republicans in Missouri screwed up big time.
According to new reports, during the time of the pandemic when we were actually paying people
the extended weekly unemployment benefits, the Republicans in charge of the state accidentally
overpaid 11,300 unemployment benefit recipients to the tune of $44 million. So they miscalculated,
they, the state made the mistake, gave people more money than they should have.
But of course, this was at a time when people didn't fully
know what was gonna be coming in unemployment. They knew it had been extended and increased.
So they didn't know, the people receiving the money, that they were getting too much.
And now these Republicans that control Missouri are telling these people, hey, you have to pay
us back now. And the money for some people is more than $10,000 that these people who are struggling
to find work still clearly don't have and that's what they have told local reporters in Missouri.
We don't have the money and the state is telling us, you have to pay us back. We don't even have
the means to do it. We spent that money obviously to keep our lives going during the pandemic.
One of 'em admitted that the letter he received made it clear that this was
through no fault on your part, no omission on your part, no fraud on your part,
but you have to pay this back because we made a mistake.
That's a pretty big oopsy daisies for the Republican controlled state of Missouri.
You screwed up and you didn't catch your mistake
soon enough to stop these people from cashing the full check, or however the hell that works.
You could have put end to this after the first round of payments, or maybe even the second or
third. Right? I understand it takes some time. But to let this go on in some cases for over
a year before you look at it and say, oh, wow. Yeah, that was bad. Give us back our 10, $15,000,
absolutely unacceptable. And what makes it even more unacceptable
is that the government actually has the ability to forgive that. They don't have to pay it back.
The government could come in and say, hey, don't worry about it. We're forgiving it.
They're literally making the choice to not do that.
They could own it. They could eat it. Basically say, listen, we screwed up. People got more than
they were supposed to. It's not their fault. It's our fault. We're gonna eat this loss. But no,
they won't do that. So instead they're trying to stick it to people who are already destitute,
already struggling to get by, still struggling to find work and they're gonna slap them with these
thousands and thousands of dollars in repayments and I shutter to think about what's gonna happen
to these people when they, by their own admission, can't pay it back. But I have to imagine it's not
gonna be good for the individuals who got screwed over because the Republicans made a mistake.