It's time to admit it. The country is in the early to mid stages of economic collapse.
Why? Because we have an identified, but deliberately tolerated (and in fact encouraged) market failure a small % up top wants to keep exploiting.
Capitalism relies on competition to keep things “fair”.
It only keeps things fair when there is competition.
For too long, companies have not truly been competing for workers.
Even now, are they really? Your chain burger joint didn't close because they couldn't find workers. They closed because they made the choice to shut down rather than pay a livable wage. Showing a willingness to close a location puts pressure on their workers in other locations. Your local burger joint might have collapsed because they can't find workers at a rate they can afford. If so? Other places are still in business, their business model stunk. Maybe the loans they took out didn't allow it. Maybe the owner wanted too much of the take to allow enough to keep the place running. Maybe the rent was too high at that location. Maybe they simply had such a bland burger, people preferred the chain across the street. According to Capitalism, that business should fail. That's competition in action.
Our market failure is that companies aren't competing for labor. Capitalism only works as long as there's enough companies competing for labor that wages are kept high enough to provide a living wage for everyone and a safety net for those who can't work. Those setting policy (by buying politicians or becoming politicians themselves) want that market failure, because it means (in the short term) more money for themselves. This costs lives. Capital first, remove the safety net politics is indirect, faceless murder, but murder none-the-less, and those pushing it are doing so with full knowledge of this fact. Eventually someone you know will slip between the rails of the system and starve, so some asshole who knows exactly what they're doing (if not to who they're doing it) can afford another yacht.
Society has to decide what is our goal as a nation.
The only ethical goal is “no one who wants to live will be allowed to starve / die of exposure for no good reason”. Anything less is sentencing someone to death for the “third yacht money” of someone else. Anything else is tyranny, if hiding behind a fig leaf.
If there's not enough competition for workers between businesses, there are three solutions.
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Move from a market based solution to something else.
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Treat murder-through-policy as murder and sentence the responsible appropriately for those who do things like needlessly laying off huge #s of people to boost stock price.
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Find some way to introduce competition. (UBI, tweak the retirement age and increase Social Security, a new job corps, one or several country-wide union / staffing companies all businesses must hire from or whatever else we can think of)
If the solution to all problems continues to be a mix of “it's not a problem until I'm forcibly stopped” and “I will buy every politician I need to until nothing will be done to stop me”, that's not the free market, it's tyranny with extra steps.