 Hello, I'm Jess Carver with your latest news break in Oklahoma. A man and a police officer reunited a family with their late mother's Bible. The man found the Bible in his yard while he was mowing the lawn in Florida. A dramatic rescue had to be made after a shark attacked a swimmer when a swimmer got too close to a fishing line. The swimmer was rushed to the hospital in stable condition and is expected to make a full recovery. And in Indiana, two brothers who died during the attack on Pearl Harbor have finally been laid to rest with gravestones nearly 80 years after they were buried as unknown soldiers. And that's your latest news break. Now back to America's Voice Live. Thank you for that update, Jessica. You may have heard President Joe Biden recently saying America is back with regard to the economy. But the numbers show that jobless claims are actually back on the rise. Last week's numbers showed 412,000 initial jobless claims, and that's up 37,000 from the week before. Those numbers are despite the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting a record number of job openings. Could this have anything to do with some states refusing to stop unemployment benefits joining our panel today to discuss attorney and Republican strategist Amanda Mackie, President of the Convention of States Action, Mark Mechler, and CEO and founder of Stock Swoosh, Melissa Armo. Melissa, I want to go to you first. We keep hearing America is back. We keep hearing Joe Biden say this, whether it's in the country or outside of the country. What do you think outsiders are looking into America and thinking right now? I'm not sure what outsiders are thinking, but when you look at the data, clearly there's still an enormous amount of people that are out of work. Now, if you're an insider, if you live here, if you live in the United States, things are not back to normal. They're a lot more normal than they were, say, six months ago or even twelve months ago, but there's a lot of people out of work and there's specific industries where you can't get goods and services in a timely fashion because they can't get employees in, whether you go to a restaurant and it seems slow or whether you go to a beauty salon and they don't have enough people to to wait on you, nail text, just all these things. Even in New York City, there's so many people in New York City that make the city function and move at a fast pace and keep going. A lot of these people aren't here. Cab drivers are not back in full force in New York. So there's too many people that are still out of work and part of the reason is people are getting more money from the government and from the states on unemployment than they would at their job. And that's a problem until it's fixed, until they stop giving that extra bonus, I don't see things getting really back to normal. They can say they're back to normal, but they're not back to normal. Mark, do you agree with this? We have legislators in Michigan today saying, listen, if you're getting $40,000 a year to stay home, you're not going to go back to work. And I know for me, for me, I see we have fast food restaurants that don't even open anymore because they don't have enough people. The shelves at the grocery store aren't stocked and I'm not 100 percent. That's sure. That's because there's not enough food, but maybe not enough workers. We see this across the state. Is it due to that extra unemployment? Well, most certainly is contrary to what politicians in D.C. believe the American people aren't stupid. And if you're going to pay somebody more to stay home, then you're going to pay them to go to work, then they're going to stay home. And as long as governments are doing this and we're seeing this in blue states all across the country, I just literally met with an individual who owns a manufacturing business. He says sales are up 45 percent, but deliveries are only up 25 percent because he simply cannot hire the people because the people want to stay home then for money staying home. Amanda, when you when you hear this, do you think that this is creating a society of folks who are just getting too used to being at home? Are we going to have a culture of people who think it's just easier to be on the government's tab? We are creating a socialist nation with what we're doing. We're giving people money to stay home. That's what they do in socialist countries. And so it's unfortunate that we are creating a society of people that don't go to work in the America I grew up in. People got a paycheck when they went to work, not for staying at home. And that's why we have this unfortunate chain reaction with regards to restaurants and grocery stores and cabs, Uber. You know, it costs triple the cost of what it normally does to take a ride sharing car nowadays because they don't have enough people and they're enticing them with all kinds of benefits. There is a pizza delivery restaurant that has delivery in Virginia that's offering five hundred dollar bonuses for their drivers. I wrote about this in the Washington Examiner last month and, you know, here where I live in St. Petersburg, we're a largely tourism based industry and we don't have enough people to clean the rooms. They're literally giving people hotel rooms that aren't clean and telling them this is the best that we got because we don't have workers who will come to work. What is good to hear is that the two states that are have the highest number of unemployment, the highest unemployment rate, California and Pennsylvania in July will be enacting a work search requirements. So that's a good thing. But one thing that I've heard is that people sign up and they don't show up for their interviews. Wow. All right, Mark, I want to go back to something that you said. You were talking about manufacturing jobs. I had a headhunter contact me a few months ago and say, we're in such trouble in the manufacturing industry. My first 10 years of my career was spent in a steel foundry. He said, listen, we are telling people to live in mediocrity. We're telling them that they should they should spend the rest of their lives at a fast food restaurant instead of start their career there and move on to something else. We have all of these manufacturing jobs where you go in at nineteen twenty dollars an hour can move up. And ultimately a lot of these companies will pay for a management degree. If that's what you want to do at some point, why are these companies being demonized as the worst places to work and why can't we get skilled labor? Well, I think there's that's a two full thing. And one is there's a cultural rot taking place. There is an inherent human value in work. There's a certain self esteem that comes from working and earning a paycheck. So we're incentivizing people to stay home. We're destroying their self esteem. We're destroying our country culturally. But there's also an underlying Marxist ideology that's been infused in our country. It started back in the nineteen twenties. It's now reaching its zenith. People are openly talking about Marxism and socialism in America. And when you do that, you're going to destroy the work ethic. You have to demonize these big companies. We say CEOs are evil. We say making a lot of money is evil. That's not the American way. In fact, it's the antithesis of the American way. Melissa, I'll go to you. I agree with that. And I look at our manufacturing companies, even our our farmers, our agriculture industry. All of these folks are saying we can't get people working. Now, when Trump was in office, he told everybody, I will bring these jobs back from overseas. We still need to bring more of these these companies back. We still need to add more jobs into our states here in the United States. But what do we do if the workers won't go back to work? Well, first of all, they have to stop the extra unemployment benefits. But I also want to say one thing. These labor jobs, people act like they're they're they're not good jobs. Being a skilled labor is actually extremely, extremely important. I mean, I personally don't know how to fix certain things in my home and have to call and hire someone to these are really important jobs. And we need them. And some of them have amazing benefits, especially if they're union. My papa was a pipe fitter for over 30 years. He was union. These are good paying jobs with good benefits. And people shouldn't look down on people that that do these jobs. I understand that some of the jobs are right out of the gate, like working at the fast food places. But, you know, teenagers can get that job. Summer school kids can get those jobs. And then they can work their way up eventually and go into something else. There's something also that I want to say that the previous guest said, as far as the work ethic goes, when you're not motivated to to work, you you get into this routine where you become lazy. You know how you go on vacation? If you take a long vacation, you go on vacation for two weeks or give the summer off. It is really hard then to go back to work and get motivated. Think about this. Some people have been at work for a year and a half for 15, 16 months. I mean, what if it gets into 2022? You're not going to see the same level of productivity from people. And I'm telling you, it's going to eventually be reflected in the market. We're starting to see that a little bit here now. The banks sold off this week. Goldman Sachs, JPM, they sold off this week from the highs. The market is now down today. This is going to all come home to Roost at some point if somebody doesn't take charge of it. And it seems like nobody really is the administration. That's a good point. I mean, I want to compare this administration with the last administration. You had the Trump administration constantly talking about how to bring jobs back. I hear governors saying, we're bringing back 90 jobs and acting like they're changing their entire state. When Joe Biden comes out and says America is back, what is he backing that up with? With the trillions of dollars, him and the Democrats are spending in Washington. There's one party rule in Washington and they want to spend their way out of a problem. And it's clearly not working as we just talked about in the last segment. What is really important is that we have these technical and trade schools available to people and stop stigmatizing them as we just discussed. I think it's really important that we have these schools be a part of the high school that you go to, not a separate school, a separate entity. So kids feel like they have to go somewhere where it feels a little different than being in high school. These are really good, important skills as we have discussed. We need the skilled labor force as the baby boomers exit the economy and exit the job force. These are really important. In fact, the posts for these jobs, in other words, job openings are from between 30 and 50 percent increasing over year over year for these types of jobs. They're really important. They we need these types of workers, yet we don't have the mechanism in place, the schooling in place to really be able to train people for these jobs. And that's what this administration should focus on. I think that's what's important, not spending more, spending more, spending more to give people benefits to stay home. I'll leave you with this. If you look at the situation with our college students, our college students go in. Oftentimes they're in college for five years. Our tradesmen come out of high school. They go directly into their job. In many cases, I know here in Michigan, they can be making six figures right out of the gate. So if you look at that five years, that kid that came out of college and went right into the workforce, he is now, what, $600,000 ahead of his buddy who has debt of $150,000 to $200,000. These jobs are good jobs. They're great careers. They feed your family and they let you live very well in this country. It's a shame what has happened to these jobs. But I appreciate all of you here today. Thank you so much for being a part of our panel. Thank you. Thank you. Stay tuned. Coming up after our break, Real America's voice correspondent, Amanda Head, will be joining us with her hot take.