Gabby Jones / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Import
States issued $ 794 billion in combined state and federal unemployment benefits from March 2020 to July 2021, according to a U.S. Department of Labor spokeswoman.
This sum is much higher than in any other period in history, according to labor experts.
It is difficult to make direct comparisons, due to the different time scales of the economic recession. For example, we can examine 2009, the year in which unemployment peaked during the Great Recession, which before the pandemic had been the worst recession in the United States since the Great Depression.
According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, the unemployed received $ 128 billion in total unemployment benefits in 2009. By comparison, the unemployed had raised $ 637 billion (five times more) about a year after the CARES Act become law, according to The Century Foundation.
The policies of the CARES Act were intended to replace a large number of lost paychecks, as laid-off workers were asked to stay home to reduce the spread of the virus.
“We had a lot of people who wanted to stay home,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. “We also had a lot of people who lost their jobs right away.”
The law temporarily increased the amount of weekly benefits by $ 600 a week and then by $ 300 a week at various points later. These infusions basically doubled or tripled the average weekly benefit.
It extended aid to millions of people, such as the self-employed and group workers, who were previously not eligible for traditional state unemployment insurance. The long-term unemployed also received weeks of additional federally-funded benefits when they ran out of state aid.
The $ 794 billion issued through July 2021 includes:
- Bonus payments ($ 300 and $ 600 a week): $ 418 billion
- State Unemployment Insurance: $ 167 billion
- Pandemic unemployment assistance (for workers): $ 122 billion
- Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (for the long-term unemployed): $ 75 billion
- Extended benefits (for the long-term unemployed): $ 12 billion.
Recipients
According to labor experts, determining the number of unique individuals who have made profits during the pandemic is an administrative challenge. The Department of Labor does not collect this data from the states, according to a spokeswoman.
One year after the pandemic, up to 46.2 million people had received at least a week of benefits, totaling about 1 in 4 workers, according to an estimate by The Century Foundation.
This projection includes 15.5 million people who received at least one week of unemployment assistance in pandemic cases (for self-employed and contract workers), who had never before been eligible for scale benefits. national.
“Surely it could be said [unemployment benefits] it reached a lot more people unambiguously, because they changed coverage, ”said Julia Lane, an economist and professor at New York University, about the CARES Act expansion of lawmakers.
In comparison, 14.5 million Americans received at least one benefit payment in 2009, less than a third of the annual pandemic total, according to the Century Foundation analysis. And 5 million did so in the twelve months before the pandemic began.
Total weeks
The “Total offset weeks” is another way to measure the scope of receiving the benefit. Measures the number of weekly benefit payments issued.
It is not an exact measure of the number of individuals, because it does not control the duration. (For example, ten weeks of paid benefits may mean that one person received help for 10 weeks or that 10 people each received one week.)
According to the Department of Labor, there were approximately 1.5 billion compensated weeks from March 2020 to July 2021.
The sum includes:
- Pandemic unemployment assistance: 609 million weeks
- Regular state benefits: 555 million weeks
- Emergency pandemic unemployment compensation: 251 million weeks
- Extended benefits: 34 million weeks
In comparison, in 2009 about 400 million weekly payments were issued, about half of those paid during the first year of the pandemic, according to The Century Foundation.
According to the Department of Labor, total pandemics are also underestimated, as some states have not submitted periodic data on unemployment assistance in pandemic cases.
About half of U.S. states ended their participation in some or all of the federal unemployment programs in June or July, before their official expiration this weekend, which limited the scope of payments.