Surprise, Surprise, Ending Unemployment Benefits Early Didn’t Actually Get People Back to Work

This summer, while still in the midst of a global pandemic, 26 U.S. governors decided to cut off the supplemental unemployment insurance being offered by the federal government. They did this weeks before the assistance was set to end, cutting more than 2 million people off from an extra $300 per week at a time when unemployment was still sky-high.

The reasoning, as was repeatedly echoed by pretty much every Fox News personality, was that the extra unemployment was encouraging people to stay home, be lazy, and not even try to find work. It’s an infantilizing, offensive argument so far removed from actual reality that it should never have gained traction, and yet here we are.

Laura Ingraham: “What if we just cut off the unemployment? Hunger is a pretty powerful thing.”

Bar Rescue guy: “They only feed a military dog at night, because a hungry dog is an obedient dog. Well, if we are not causing people to be hungry to work…” pic.twitter.com/Pw5C6n6l02

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 13, 2021

The people pushing this argument seem to have no idea that the COVID-19 pandemic is still very much happening. Hundreds of thousands of businesses have permanently closed and the competition for existing jobs is extremely tough.

As for those industries that are having trouble staffing up, if an extra $300 a week is truly enough to keep people from trying to work, then perhaps the problem is with employers and the types of conditions they’ve felt comfortable offering to their workers.

The owner should consider there may be some relationship between “I’ll give you 15 an hour to work harder than I do” and “We currently have openings in all positions” https://t.co/gQyUso0MYq

— Josh Raby (@JoshRaby) August 15, 2021

But it’s a lot easier for right-wing commentators to compare workers to lazy “dogs” than to examine this system, so that’s what they’re going to do. And more than two dozen governors—all but one of whom is a Republican—backed up their horrible ideas with harmful policy.

But according to new research, not only did cutting off federal assistance early not only have little to no impact on jobs numbers, it immediately caused a decrease in spending, hurting those states’ economies.

States that cut off $300/week unemployment checks didn’t get people back to work but did see a 20% decline in spending, costing them $2 billion.

Sort of like the opposite of a stimulushttps://t.co/NMRuTmHPNq

— Dan Price (@DanPriceSeattle) August 24, 2021

According to a new paper from economists and researchers at Columbia, Harvard, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of Toronto, 7 out of every 8 people who had their benefits cut off did not then find employment. Those unemployed people also cut their weekly spending by 20%, resulting in a $2 billion loss in those states between June and the beginning of August.

It’s almost as if treating unemployed people like “hungry dogs” isn’t going to be as beneficial (for them or society as a whole) as providing access to actual financial resources.

(via CNBC, image: FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

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