"The number of individuals who received unemployment benefits decline[d] by 13.8% by the week ending June 12, compared to mid-May, in states where governors explicitly said that enhanced benefits would end in June, based on an analysis by Jefferies LLC economists."
and:
"In May, the Missouri's unemployment rate was 4.2%, below the national average of 5.8%, according to data from the Department of Labor.
Missouri ended enhanced federal benefits for unemployed state residents as of June 12, making it one of the first states to take the action."
Is a decline in the number of people who are receiveing unemployment benefits the same thing as an increase in the number returning to work? I don't actually think it is without more data to rule out other cases.
Employment rate is not "1-unemployment", there is a third component ("inactive" or something like that) so generally they're correlated but do not coincide.
Right, that's my understanding as well. There's actually _many_ different unemployment numbers, depending on what definition of employment vs not vs not even included that you want to use. The "unemployment number" without qualification we tend to use is (IMO) kind of crap, but we're stuck with it for tradition mostly as far as I can tell.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm seems to be the best resource I can find at the moment for the ones I'm thinking of, it doesn't really define them very exactly though. I'm sure they're defined _somewhere_.
Fed govt set aside cash during covid pandemic to give extra funds to people on unemployment. At the beginning of the pandemic all the states particapated, but not anymore.
Critics have accused the fed govt of irresponsibly rolling this out as the economy has rebounded, and now you have many states where businesses are struggling to find workers who want to apply for these low income jobs because unemployment + 300$(fed govt bonus) + tax benfifits > low income job. So basically 21 states stopped giving unemployed people that extra 300$, and surprise surprise, american workers are rational and more of them elected to go back to work compared to the states that still distribute that 300$.
Basically this isnt surprising, but people on the far right want to gut bloated unemployment programs and far left wants universal income + bigger welfare for nonemployed americans, and this is playing out in Washington DC now and in states accross the US who arent one party states.
There are a number of reasons why someone loses unemployment eligbability, time being one of those as you alluded to. Varies state by state.
I beleive some states like NY and Cali have extended unemployment benfifits to like September, other states probably vary.
The economics of this situation are pretty complex. The short-term benefits may also be forcing employers to raise long-term wages to compensate. The long-term wage increases for low-income jobs may result in lower usage of other government programs such as food stamps, and housing assistance.
I passed by a giant sign next to a McDonalds offering $17/hr starting wage for McDonald's employees at a roadside operation in Western Mass.
And that's $17/hr * 40hrs * 50weeks = $34,000 / year. A single person could be comfortable on that kind of money, but they won't exactly living the luxury life either. I think that's a pretty reasonable baseline for a full-time-employed resident of the USA.
I dont think anyone likes the fact that US minimum wage is so low. Seeimg the higher wage offers has been pleasant, but not being able to go in restaurants because they have been unable to hire enough staff hasnt been.
Mcdonalds + Amazon wont be a victim of minumum wage laws, they advocate for high minumum wages, as less productive chains and small businesses with smaller margins will have to die off to allow for more mcdonalds and amazon.
It is sad how expensive some parts of the country are, and the minimum wage "should" be higher, but ive seen economists say raising minum wage hurts low income earners looking for their first job (disproportionatly bipoc people), increases prices for everything, increases govt beurocracy, and simply doesnt work as a simple fix.
However, you have to say you're looking for work to count as unemployed. If I get $300 to say so, then I might say I'm looking for work (and genuinely look for it) -- but if I no longer get any benefit (or much less) from saying so, then I might not bother with all the (tedious paternalist) paperwork to get counted as 'unemployed'
> but if I no longer get any benefit (or much less) from saying so, then I might not bother with all the (tedious paternalist) paperwork to get counted as 'unemployed'
AFAIK there is no paperwork for this survey. They call people up and ask a few questions to classify you.
That NYT uses secondary metrics like clicks on a website. Pretty strong evidence that the primary metrics (how many people actually work) doesn't go in their favour. The business insider talks about unemployment, not exactly the same thing as how many are working but it is a way better metric than website clicks or anecdotes.
IANAL but my understanding is that companies have to register to do business in each state that they want to employ remote workers in. So if you're a Texas resident, the CA company would have had to register in Texas to have you on payroll, and that relationship would be governed by Texas law.
Of course if you kept your driver's license in CA and just happen to physically be in Texas without telling your employer that, then it'd be CA.
> So if you're a Texas resident, the CA company would have had to register in Texas to have you on payroll, and that relationship would be governed by Texas law.
I don’t think this is fully correct. My understanding is that it’s about where the work is being done, not the residency.
For example, many businesses in Portland, OR employ residents of Vancouver, WA (right across the river). When COVID hit and those WA residents became remote employees, many Portland businesses had to become registered in WA because that is now where they had employees located.
I'm confused by unemployment. Doesn't the company essentially pay it? The employee also gets taxed when their paycheck is deducted for unemployment insurance every month. Did they get this money back if they never use it? We know the state gov is involved somehow, because they extended programs, but how?
I can't figure out if it is the company, yourself or the state, or a mix of all three involved in unemployment. And does it make sense to use the state you physically live in or the state where the company is?
I think with remote work and different states offering different amounts, this can all be gamed for maximum benefits.
Think about it in the sense of where you earned the money. If you live in Washington but physically work in Oregon, you’re earning money (and paying income tax) in Oregon.
You’re only eligible to apply for unemployment in states where you worked and meet the eligibility criteria.
So in that case, no matter what bonuses WA is offering, you only paid into the OR system so that’s the one you’re eligible for.
There’s no “shopping around” because (for the most part) you’re only working in and paying into the system of a single state.
INAL, but when I ran a remote company I had to register my business in the state my employees lived in and pay unemployment tax in their individual home states. If my employees worked outside of their home state (nomadically) then I think the states they travelled to technically want a share of that income, but that it's the employee's responsibility to report that income as being earned in that state, not the employers. The employer continues to pay W2 wages + unemployment tax or 1099 income in the employee's state of residence until the employee changes their residency status.
In practice however, nomadic income only typically gets reported for high income employees like professional sports players or entertainers who earn large amounts of publicly identifiable income in different states throughout the year.
For an employee to file for unemployment in a state, they would first need to show residency in that state. For example, you can't pass through CA for a week and file for unemployment there.
> If my employees worked outside of their home state (nomadically) then I think the states they travelled to technically want a share of that income
There’s a bit more to it than that. An employee doing work in a location is a possible back door way of establishing nexus in that state for the business. Amazon, for example, knew they had a target on their back so forbid employees from even turning computers on in some states.
No, you are treated as a Texan employee and would not be eligible for CA unemployment benefits.
Contrary to what the other response stated, it does not matter where your DL address is; it matters where you are actually resident (generally, physical residence). If you were to claim CA unemployment using a CA DL but were residing in TX at the time you were employed, you would be committing fraud. Note that if you hadn't told your employer that you had moved to a different state, generally they can terminate you "for cause", meaning that you would not be eligible for unemployment in either state.
I guess it might technically legally be fraud but OTOH I wouldn't call it "wrong" because if you maintained CA domicile you'd keep paying CA income tax on your income.
And with TX not having income tax, it's almost like your CA income tax pays into the benefit pool...
If you maintain your CA domicile and continue to pay CA income taxes, then in that example, your physical and legal residence would remain in CA, so you're not a TX resident, you're a CA resident temporarily in TX. (Yes, residency is very complicated for state purposes, as each state has its own definition and thresholds.)
Also, unemployment is funded by employers, not income taxes, using an insurance-style scheme.
This seems like a really inflamatory framing. We're all forced to work jobs. But that seems like an inevitable fact until we can automate enough so that there's such a thing as a free lunch. And poor people are the ones with low paying jobs, but that's more of a tautology than an indictment.
At face value the above reads like a common sense statement about the world we live in. However more practically there are a number of deeper economic considerations that don't have clear cut answers such as
"How much human capital is consumed by low productivity enterprises leveraging the immobility/lack of choice present in impoverished workers? If workers had mobility/safety would they move to higher productivity work?"
"Should the minimum wage for workers be equal to the wage where the government doesn't need to provide benefits? If it's not, why does the government subsidize low productivity employers?"
Labor prices only exist in a free market so long as there are sufficient regulations to prevent exploitative labor arrangements and starvations. Theoretical arguments centered on bid/ask spreads don't quite apply in a world where there are life and death consequences to the market not clearing.
> "Should the minimum wage for workers be equal to the wage where the government doesn't need to provide benefits? If it's not, why does the government subsidize low productivity employers?
I'm not sure I follow. How does the government "subsidize low productivity employers"? What does "low productivity" employers/work even mean?
Consider pin factory A that has invested in new machines and pays a few workers well, alongside factory B that instead uses old machines and lots of cheap labour to achieve the same business outcome.
Factory A is a high productivity (per employee) employer and factory B is a low productivity employer.
Yes, B employs a lot of people but in a certain sense it is also wasting their productive lives.
Re: subsidies, if you pay workers very little their income may be supplemented by government assistance such as food stamps. Some employers rely on this in the sense that many of their employees would not be able to afford to live without this assistance.
Some people believe that the clearing price for labour would be higher without this assistance (because the pool of people willing and able to work without it would be smaller). This does seem a fairly logical matter of supply and demand. However since it seems inhumane to cut off that support they generally advocate raising the minimum wage to incorporate the subsidies that would be provided instead.
> Should the minimum wage for workers be equal to the wage where the government doesn't need to provide benefits? If it's not, why does the government subsidize low productivity employers?
The government isn’t subsidizing low productivity employers, its subsidizing people whose labor isn’t valued in the market. Mostly, those subsidies go up if people aren't employed compared to where they would be if they were employed at low wages, so the employer is subsidizing the government support system, not vice versa.
The employer is benefiting from a lower labour market clearing price due to government subsidies.
The government benefits from increased employment, even if some subsidy must be provided.
Those two things can be true at the same time!
However the subsidies distort the labour market and incent low productivity labour.
One question is whether raising minimum wage beyond the subsidy level would cost more in increased unemployment than the value of the subsidies provided.
That's a deeper question about labour market structure and demand, and the answer might be different in different places and times.
Are you using the term "low productivity labor" to mean low wage labor? Because the two are not the same thing. There are plenty of low wage jobs that are very high productivity. Wages aren't set based on productivity they are set by supply and demand of the labor.
We can tell the difference between high productivity / low wages and low productivity / low wages because the latter will tend to shed jobs on subsidy withdrawal while the former will tend to pay more.
Workers with high productivity but low wages (let's say, in an factory where the owners make a lot but the employees are easily replaceable) are still a good deal at a legislated higher price, the owners just get less of the surplus.
Another way to think about it is that while productivity doesn't set wages, it represents the ceiling of what you'd be able to pay. Those marginal, low productivity, "can't afford to pay you more" jobs are what you lose when you remove subsidies (or increase minimum wage).
We're not all forced to work jobs that pay less than a living wage, in dangerous or dehumanizing conditions, without benefits like retirement or health care, with the possibility of being terminated without warning by an algorithm. But cutting off unemployment benefits leaves many people with few, if any, other choices.
> until we can automate enough so that there's such a thing as a free lunch
This is a wonderful Asimovian ideal. Alternative future: we automated many people out of jobs and they are left in the cold because we don't prioritize re-training and social services.
The solution isn't to pay them to stay home. That's just bad governance, stupid fiscally and economically for a nation.
The exceptionally obvious solution is an income credit that artificially increases their wages beyond what the market is paying for their low skill labor.
If the Democrats knew what they were doing they would have taken care of this decades ago instead of constantly fighting for higher minimum wage adjustments. Their lack of understanding of economics and business is astounding and terrifying. You can set the minimum wage at $5 while setting an income credit instead. The minimum wage cuts off unskilled labor at the knees; if your labor is only worth $5/hr and the minimum wage is $15, you're screwed big time. You're frozen out of the labor market. It cultivates a permanent underclass stuck on welfare in a poverty cycle. If you leave the minimum wage low and increase an income credit, you don't suffer the problem of labor being excluded from the market. Someone that has labor worth $5/hr in the market, can then earn $15 thanks to the credit that fills in their wage.
This is how you fill out the labor force while simultaneously boosting wages. The minimum wage is a regressive approach - it harms the lowest value labor the most - as is paying people to stay home. The dumbest thing a nation can do is pay people to stay home. There are always superior alternatives to that approach.
I haven't seen much strong evidence suggesting that a $15 minimum wage is actually freezing people out of the labor market.
Not to mention, people work under the table all the time.
That said, the wage credit idea isn't bad either. The problem is that now the government is just subsidizing companies that pay low wages with no way to recoup even part of the subsidy. You're basically opening a firehose of welfare from consumers to employers.
If someone started at a $5/hr job and was able to average a 10% per year income gain thanks to tireless effort and increasing skills they would eventually reach the income of $12/hr after 10 years. During this decade of tireless effort they would have seen no take income increase and their employer would have been giving them raises just to reduce the government benefit they receive.
It's hit or miss as to whether a $15/hr job puts people on a good long-term footing in their career. Putting a person in a $5/hr job that the government tops up will likely just create lifetime wage subsidies as we see today via food stamps/welfare etc.
What if you were treated with the decency to not risk a horrible death because a politician's side paycheck is determined by how cheap a companies workers could be paid?
We don’t expect everyone to work to pay for things. If you have enough money in a market account, you never have to work again. Why the double standard?
If you were able to get that much money, then you provided enough value to get that amount. When people say "work" what they mean is "provide value". No double standard.
It's funny when people act surprised that other people respond to incentives. Of course if you pay people to not work they will not work. If you don't pay them unless they work, they will work. Do we have to relearn this lesson after every round of left wing economic interventionism?
Unemployment metrics measure those people who are receiving benefits, which is not a perfect proxy for people who lack jobs. It would make sense that people go to less effort to maintain benefits when the payoff becomes substantially smaller.
People in the comments seem to not be reading the article, there’s a lot of back and forth about whether the article is looking at the overall unemployment rate or just those receiving benefits.
> The number of individuals who received unemployment benefits decline by 13.8% by the week ending June 12, compared to mid-May, in states where governors explicitly said that enhanced benefits would end in June, based on an analysis by Jefferies LLC economists.
>This figure compares to a 10% decline in states that are ending benefits in July, and a smaller 5.7% decline in states that intend to keep the benefits until the funding ends in September.
As we can see it’s referring to unemployment claims, not the overall rate. So we don’t know whether people are workin or not.
That said, I would suspect that it is indeed due to more people going back to work. But there is again another reference to that in the article:
> In May, the Missouri's unemployment rate was 4.2%, below the national average of 5.8%, according to data from the Department of Labor.
Missouri seems to have been back to more or less full employment, or around there when it cut off the extra benefits. What i think a lot of people are missing is that the confounding factor here is that political choices like ending the extra benefit are correlated with lighter lockdown policies. It’s likely that these states have already been ahead on re opening as well. measuring the effect of ending the unemployment benefits themselves requires looking at that data as well.
I'd like to see this side by side with poverty, homeless, etc rates. I cannot see this practice improving long term outcomes, economic or health wise.
I think this article also dismisses that even if there are millions of job openings that doesn't mean they pay a living wage or a wage that can sustain a family or prepare for retirement. Coming out of 2008 we lost a ton of reasonable pay positions for multiple part time or gig economy work that crushed so many of my college peers.
Simply driving down unemployment is a false method of tracking economic progress or recovery.
Roberson's story at the end is exactly what I'm getting at. Lose a reasonable $26/hour and now stuck with a $7.25/hour job at best is not going to help America recover but only demonstrate employers can lobby to abuse workers all day long.
62 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] thread"The number of individuals who received unemployment benefits decline[d] by 13.8% by the week ending June 12, compared to mid-May, in states where governors explicitly said that enhanced benefits would end in June, based on an analysis by Jefferies LLC economists."
and:
"In May, the Missouri's unemployment rate was 4.2%, below the national average of 5.8%, according to data from the Department of Labor.
Missouri ended enhanced federal benefits for unemployed state residents as of June 12, making it one of the first states to take the action."
I do not know the exact numbers for this.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm seems to be the best resource I can find at the moment for the ones I'm thinking of, it doesn't really define them very exactly though. I'm sure they're defined _somewhere_.
Critics have accused the fed govt of irresponsibly rolling this out as the economy has rebounded, and now you have many states where businesses are struggling to find workers who want to apply for these low income jobs because unemployment + 300$(fed govt bonus) + tax benfifits > low income job. So basically 21 states stopped giving unemployed people that extra 300$, and surprise surprise, american workers are rational and more of them elected to go back to work compared to the states that still distribute that 300$.
Basically this isnt surprising, but people on the far right want to gut bloated unemployment programs and far left wants universal income + bigger welfare for nonemployed americans, and this is playing out in Washington DC now and in states accross the US who arent one party states.
There are a number of reasons why someone loses unemployment eligbability, time being one of those as you alluded to. Varies state by state.
I beleive some states like NY and Cali have extended unemployment benfifits to like September, other states probably vary.
I passed by a giant sign next to a McDonalds offering $17/hr starting wage for McDonald's employees at a roadside operation in Western Mass.
Point being: we need to stop thinking of $15/hr as a high hourly wage.
Mcdonalds + Amazon wont be a victim of minumum wage laws, they advocate for high minumum wages, as less productive chains and small businesses with smaller margins will have to die off to allow for more mcdonalds and amazon.
It is sad how expensive some parts of the country are, and the minimum wage "should" be higher, but ive seen economists say raising minum wage hurts low income earners looking for their first job (disproportionatly bipoc people), increases prices for everything, increases govt beurocracy, and simply doesnt work as a simple fix.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#where
AFAIK there is no paperwork for this survey. They call people up and ask a few questions to classify you.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/business/economy/jobs-wor...
Of course if you kept your driver's license in CA and just happen to physically be in Texas without telling your employer that, then it'd be CA.
I don’t think this is fully correct. My understanding is that it’s about where the work is being done, not the residency.
For example, many businesses in Portland, OR employ residents of Vancouver, WA (right across the river). When COVID hit and those WA residents became remote employees, many Portland businesses had to become registered in WA because that is now where they had employees located.
I can't figure out if it is the company, yourself or the state, or a mix of all three involved in unemployment. And does it make sense to use the state you physically live in or the state where the company is?
I think with remote work and different states offering different amounts, this can all be gamed for maximum benefits.
You’re only eligible to apply for unemployment in states where you worked and meet the eligibility criteria.
So in that case, no matter what bonuses WA is offering, you only paid into the OR system so that’s the one you’re eligible for.
There’s no “shopping around” because (for the most part) you’re only working in and paying into the system of a single state.
This link might help:
https://www.cbpp.org/research/introduction-to-unemployment-i...
In practice however, nomadic income only typically gets reported for high income employees like professional sports players or entertainers who earn large amounts of publicly identifiable income in different states throughout the year.
For an employee to file for unemployment in a state, they would first need to show residency in that state. For example, you can't pass through CA for a week and file for unemployment there.
There’s a bit more to it than that. An employee doing work in a location is a possible back door way of establishing nexus in that state for the business. Amazon, for example, knew they had a target on their back so forbid employees from even turning computers on in some states.
Contrary to what the other response stated, it does not matter where your DL address is; it matters where you are actually resident (generally, physical residence). If you were to claim CA unemployment using a CA DL but were residing in TX at the time you were employed, you would be committing fraud. Note that if you hadn't told your employer that you had moved to a different state, generally they can terminate you "for cause", meaning that you would not be eligible for unemployment in either state.
And with TX not having income tax, it's almost like your CA income tax pays into the benefit pool...
Also, unemployment is funded by employers, not income taxes, using an insurance-style scheme.
"How much human capital is consumed by low productivity enterprises leveraging the immobility/lack of choice present in impoverished workers? If workers had mobility/safety would they move to higher productivity work?"
"Should the minimum wage for workers be equal to the wage where the government doesn't need to provide benefits? If it's not, why does the government subsidize low productivity employers?"
Labor prices only exist in a free market so long as there are sufficient regulations to prevent exploitative labor arrangements and starvations. Theoretical arguments centered on bid/ask spreads don't quite apply in a world where there are life and death consequences to the market not clearing.
I'm not sure I follow. How does the government "subsidize low productivity employers"? What does "low productivity" employers/work even mean?
Factory A is a high productivity (per employee) employer and factory B is a low productivity employer.
Yes, B employs a lot of people but in a certain sense it is also wasting their productive lives.
Re: subsidies, if you pay workers very little their income may be supplemented by government assistance such as food stamps. Some employers rely on this in the sense that many of their employees would not be able to afford to live without this assistance.
Some people believe that the clearing price for labour would be higher without this assistance (because the pool of people willing and able to work without it would be smaller). This does seem a fairly logical matter of supply and demand. However since it seems inhumane to cut off that support they generally advocate raising the minimum wage to incorporate the subsidies that would be provided instead.
The government isn’t subsidizing low productivity employers, its subsidizing people whose labor isn’t valued in the market. Mostly, those subsidies go up if people aren't employed compared to where they would be if they were employed at low wages, so the employer is subsidizing the government support system, not vice versa.
The government benefits from increased employment, even if some subsidy must be provided.
Those two things can be true at the same time!
However the subsidies distort the labour market and incent low productivity labour.
One question is whether raising minimum wage beyond the subsidy level would cost more in increased unemployment than the value of the subsidies provided.
That's a deeper question about labour market structure and demand, and the answer might be different in different places and times.
We can tell the difference between high productivity / low wages and low productivity / low wages because the latter will tend to shed jobs on subsidy withdrawal while the former will tend to pay more.
Workers with high productivity but low wages (let's say, in an factory where the owners make a lot but the employees are easily replaceable) are still a good deal at a legislated higher price, the owners just get less of the surplus.
Another way to think about it is that while productivity doesn't set wages, it represents the ceiling of what you'd be able to pay. Those marginal, low productivity, "can't afford to pay you more" jobs are what you lose when you remove subsidies (or increase minimum wage).
Hence, subsidies targeted at low wage earners disproportionately incent low productivity labour.
We're not all forced to work jobs that pay less than a living wage, in dangerous or dehumanizing conditions, without benefits like retirement or health care, with the possibility of being terminated without warning by an algorithm. But cutting off unemployment benefits leaves many people with few, if any, other choices.
This is a wonderful Asimovian ideal. Alternative future: we automated many people out of jobs and they are left in the cold because we don't prioritize re-training and social services.
The exceptionally obvious solution is an income credit that artificially increases their wages beyond what the market is paying for their low skill labor.
If the Democrats knew what they were doing they would have taken care of this decades ago instead of constantly fighting for higher minimum wage adjustments. Their lack of understanding of economics and business is astounding and terrifying. You can set the minimum wage at $5 while setting an income credit instead. The minimum wage cuts off unskilled labor at the knees; if your labor is only worth $5/hr and the minimum wage is $15, you're screwed big time. You're frozen out of the labor market. It cultivates a permanent underclass stuck on welfare in a poverty cycle. If you leave the minimum wage low and increase an income credit, you don't suffer the problem of labor being excluded from the market. Someone that has labor worth $5/hr in the market, can then earn $15 thanks to the credit that fills in their wage.
This is how you fill out the labor force while simultaneously boosting wages. The minimum wage is a regressive approach - it harms the lowest value labor the most - as is paying people to stay home. The dumbest thing a nation can do is pay people to stay home. There are always superior alternatives to that approach.
Not to mention, people work under the table all the time.
That said, the wage credit idea isn't bad either. The problem is that now the government is just subsidizing companies that pay low wages with no way to recoup even part of the subsidy. You're basically opening a firehose of welfare from consumers to employers.
It's hit or miss as to whether a $15/hr job puts people on a good long-term footing in their career. Putting a person in a $5/hr job that the government tops up will likely just create lifetime wage subsidies as we see today via food stamps/welfare etc.
id expect a healthier wage in states pushing employers to raise their poverty wages, skmilar to an artificial minimum wage.
Shocking.
And that's ok. When I work, I also provide value for others and they give me valuable things in return - like money for food.
Is it indecent to expect people to work to pay for things?
> The number of individuals who received unemployment benefits decline by 13.8% by the week ending June 12, compared to mid-May, in states where governors explicitly said that enhanced benefits would end in June, based on an analysis by Jefferies LLC economists.
>This figure compares to a 10% decline in states that are ending benefits in July, and a smaller 5.7% decline in states that intend to keep the benefits until the funding ends in September.
As we can see it’s referring to unemployment claims, not the overall rate. So we don’t know whether people are workin or not.
That said, I would suspect that it is indeed due to more people going back to work. But there is again another reference to that in the article:
> In May, the Missouri's unemployment rate was 4.2%, below the national average of 5.8%, according to data from the Department of Labor.
Missouri seems to have been back to more or less full employment, or around there when it cut off the extra benefits. What i think a lot of people are missing is that the confounding factor here is that political choices like ending the extra benefit are correlated with lighter lockdown policies. It’s likely that these states have already been ahead on re opening as well. measuring the effect of ending the unemployment benefits themselves requires looking at that data as well.
I think this article also dismisses that even if there are millions of job openings that doesn't mean they pay a living wage or a wage that can sustain a family or prepare for retirement. Coming out of 2008 we lost a ton of reasonable pay positions for multiple part time or gig economy work that crushed so many of my college peers.
Simply driving down unemployment is a false method of tracking economic progress or recovery.
Roberson's story at the end is exactly what I'm getting at. Lose a reasonable $26/hour and now stuck with a $7.25/hour job at best is not going to help America recover but only demonstrate employers can lobby to abuse workers all day long.