Covid handouts are to blame for male worklessness, says former Trump secretary

Interview: Wilbur Ross on a welfare payments ‘disease’ and dwindling work ethics

Welfare payments given to furloughed staff during the pandemic were a “disease” that is now driving male worklessness, President Trump’s former commerce secretary has said.
Wilbur Ross, the Wall Street financier known as the “king of bankruptcy”, warned there was “a real danger” that young men in the US and UK are losing their work ethic because of handouts during Covid.
He said: “During Covid, there were quite [a few] people in the US who were getting paid more through various programmes for not working than they ever got paid when they were working. That is not a good thing to do to a portion of the population.”
Mr Ross likened the UK’s furlough scheme to Covid stimulus cheques paid out by President Biden, both of which he said have brought widespread “apathy” in the workforce and were part of “the same disease”.
Mr Ross restructured more than $400bn (£308) in assets during his career, first at the banking giant Rothschild and then through his own private equity firm WL Ross & Co. He then became the oldest person ever to take on a role in the US Cabinet under President Trump in 2016.
Now 86, he has published a book, Risks and Returns: Creating Success in Business and Life, documenting his life and time in office – just in time for the US election, which will be a fierce contest between his former boss Mr Trump and Kamala Harris, the Democrat nominee.
Anecdotes include a personal request from President Trump in 2018 to call “idiot” Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, to ask him to stop raising interest rates.
A key theme is worklessness. Recent analysis by the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) showed that the UK and the US have seen the biggest drops in male labour force participation of the G7 nations. 
In his book, Mr Ross is deeply critical of Covid payouts which he describes as “conceptually indefensible”. He adds they “have contributed to the widespread worker dissatisfaction that now plagues the business community”.
But pandemic policy came on top of a wider cultural shift, Mr Ross warned. “It’s a problem that has been developing over a long time. We had such a long period of prosperity in both countries that people got a little spoiled.”
It is little more than a week before the world’s largest economy heads to the polls on November 5. It will be “very close”, but the scales looked tipped one way, Mr Ross said. The bookies have Mr Trump’s odds of winning at 65pc.
A Trump 2.0 presidency would be “a lot calmer and a lot more orderly”, Mr Ross said.
This time, Mr Trump will have the infrastructure of contacts needed to fill several hundred government posts – something he lacked back in 2016, when he had to turn to friends, and friends of friends.
“Half of them were not on board at all with our policies, particularly on trade. So we had a lot of turmoil,” Mr Ross said.
Mr Ross himself was one of Mr Trump’s business contacts. Their first meeting in 1990 was an unlikely precursor to being hired for a government post. 
Mr Ross was acting on behalf of the bondholders of Mr Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, which had quickly defaulted without making a single interest payment. Mr Ross told Mr Trump “we will come after you personally for any deficiency”. The negotiations were tense. But the future president liked Mr Ross’s blunt, hardball style.
A more stable government means Mr Trump would have far more scope to press ahead with his objectives, primarily on trade, Mr Ross said.
Mr Trump kicked off a trade war with China in 2018 by imposing significant tariffs on imports. Now, he has proposed a blanket 10pc tariff on all imports and charges as high as 60pc on goods from China.
The idea of free trade is “a myth”, Mr Ross said.
“This wonderful, enchanting theory that as a country you would make and export what you do best, and you would import what you do worst. The only problem with that is that it is not the way it works. Everybody wants to do more,” Mr Ross said.
Before the Second World War, trade tariffs were the major source of revenue for the US government, but these charges were largely lifted as the US tried to rebuild Europe and Asia during the post-war recovery, Mr Ross said.
“That probably was a good idea at the time, but I think it should have been time-limited, maybe for 10 years. But instead we made it permanent.”
Yet Mr Trump’s language on trade may be misrepresentative of what he would actually do. The Republican candidate is, at his heart, a PR machine. 
“He often speaks in metaphors without clearly identifying them as such,” said Mr Ross. “When he talks about – as he did even in his first campaign – gigantic tariffs on everything coming in, that is really meant to be a way to message to the public that he is going to be really tough on trade. But you shouldn’t fall into the trap of taking those things too literally.”
The same is true of Mr Trump’s language on Ukraine, he added. The presidential candidate has repeatedly claimed he will bring a quick end to the war and has made clear signals that he will row back on US support for Ukraine.
Yet Mr Ross’s view is that it is “essential that we win”, not least to stop the spread of wider conflict.
“But I think there’s a more important reason, frankly, both for Ukraine and also with Israel, and that is, think back, how did World War Two get started?
“China, Russia, North Korea and Iran, they all always support each other. While I don’t know if they do literally have a mutual defence pact, they are certainly acting like it. So I am very worried, given that this could well be the beginning of the formation of a new axis of powers.”
Mr Ross’s book is published on the eve of Rachel Reeves’s maiden Budget, which is, in cash terms, expected to be Britain’s biggest tax-raising fiscal event in history.
Ms Reeves is expected to announce increases in employer National Insurance and rises in capital gains tax. She will also press ahead with Labour’s manifesto pledge to tighten the non-dom tax regime, which allows wealthy internationals to avoid paying tax on overseas income unless they bring it into the country.
The impact of scrapping the non-dom tax regime will depend on what Ms Reeves chooses to replace it with, but the risks are clear, Mr Ross said. “If they say any non-dom, regardless of how long they have been here, has to pay full UK tax on their global income, there will be mass migration,” he said.
But when it comes to UK tax rises, it was the last Conservative government that started it, Mr Ross said.
In November 2023, Jeremy Hunt, the then-chancellor, said he had made “the biggest business tax cut in modern history, and the largest ever tax cut for workers” after he made full expensing permanent and cut two percentage points off National Insurance. But this statement overlooked his stealth tax raid that meant the tax burden was still at a record post-war high.
“The Conservative Party really never implemented its own programmes. They did the reverse,” Mr Ross said. It was also Mr Hunt who first announced he would scrap the so-called non-dom tax regime, he added.
“Whether you like Trump or not, at least he does pretty much what he says he is going to do. The Conservatives, for whatever reason, never did implement their own platform. I think, frankly, it is part of the political problem that they have.”