This is exactly where I am too. I thought replacing all of our existing safety net programs with UBI would be perfect until the COVID money happened. I knew some people would choose to just live off of it forever and never contribute to society again, but I didn't realize just how many people it would be.
I'd like to see some data to support that claim. Fed data shows the opposite--the employment ratio is down 1.5% from its 2020 peak. That's at least a million people who've stopped working.
This isn't jobs data... This is an estimate, by an unknown source, as to what the employment numbers might be be at the end of 2022. From your site:
> In 2019, around 157.54 million people were employed in the United States. For 2022, an increase by almost 2 million employed people is expected.
Also, do we think this estimate is recent? The US economy has not been adding jobs as expected, and has undershot recent projections by a lot. New hires were 300K short of projections in November[0] and 200K short in December!
I don't know, but I definitely still see more "closed today due to lack of staffing" signs today than I've ever seen in my life before the lockdowns. And even places that are open still have noticeably fewer workers.
