Please consider the Coronavirus Unemployment Calculator to determine when and where it’s better not to work.
Under the CARES Act, Americans laid off due to the coronavirus receive an additional $600 a week for the next four months, ending July 31st or upon employment. In addition, the unemployment window has been increased in each state by 13 weeks.
Massachusetts generous unemployment policies combined with the stimulus means all workers making under $73,996 would receive more a week unemployed than they do from working.
Many of these salaries outstrip the state’s median income, meaning the majority of workers would receive more from an unemployment check than a paycheck.
The stimulus package made significant changes to state unemployment. For the next four months, the unemployed will receive an additional $2,400 a month. Similarly, the added 13 weeks provides people longer to find a job in a new hostile job market.
The new package does mean a good chunk of the workforce are now receiving paychecks smaller than they would on unemployment. This includes workers in essential businesses, including hospitals and super markets, who are putting themselves in harm’s way to keep society running.
This is ridiculous of course. The next stimulus measure needs to cap the benefit at some percentage below what people were making.
Instead, the next package aims to increase the amounts and pay illegal immigrants as well.
For discussion, please see House Bill Will Give Direct Payments To Illegal Immigrants.
Mish
Apparently there is a problem where businesses on PPP recall employees, and the employees refuse to return, since they make so much more on unemployment. Mnuchin reminded those businesses to report the employee to the state unemployment boards. Employees who refuse to return to work when recalled are no longer eligible for unemployment.
I can’t complain about this on a personal level. Laid off service-industry worker and I’ve went from making just over six-figures to now maxing out UC benefits in PA without a clue when we’ll get back to having customers through the door. It’s nice to have at least a few months of making what still qualifies as a middle-class income before it drops to under $30k/year and be able to adjust. I’ve got enough stashed away and low enough living expenses to weather the storm for a year or two (or more if I really go on a budget), but in the meantime I’m sharpening my coding and Excel skills just in case a career change needs to happen. Anything extra above living expenses is going right into savings (nowhere else to spend money these days anyway). At best, the extra benefits allow me to buy a steak at the grocery store when I want to over the chicken. Anyone who’s taking this money and just blowing it is a damn fool.
I get the perverse macro-economic issues this creates, but to be honest with all the money they’re tossing around it doesn’t bother me the working and middle classes are getting a bone here even if it creates some intra-class resentment. I’d rather they solve that by giving it to everyone (working or not) versus not having the extra benefits at all. They can take it out of the corporate bailout slush fund.
Good for you, and I wish you well. Hopefully the business you worked for will recover and they can hire you back, but if not, you sound like you will land on your feet.
Somehow it is important to keep money in peoples’ pockets so they can continue to buy cheap shit made in China. At the very least, could the money be restricted to being spent on made in the USA stuff, which would include food, medical services, transportation, etc.
You can support American Citizen workers, or illegal aliens, but not both. They have opposing vested interests….
No they don’t.
People who work for a living all have one overriding vested interest: Not being robbed of what they work to earn. As in, not by ambulance chasers, nor by the Fed empowered Free Shit Army living off “assets.” Nor by the indigents, “pensioners” and other get-paid-for-doing-nothing leeches that those like to hide behind.
If you get paid for what you produce, you are no burden on anyone. Makes not a lick of difference where you happen to be born.
While, OTOH, if you get paid for doing nothing; by having The Fed rob those who do work by way of debasement in order to “make my house go up,” then you’re just in the way. A boat anchor around the ankles of the competent and productive. And all competent and productive people, of all ancestries and nationalities, would be better off without you. Just like America would.
Right on, Jdog1. Illegals as well as h1b’s lower the wages of American workers. But companies love them, and the US Chamber of Commerce loves them.
It really makes you stop and think if these policies are not being implemented with full knowledge and planning of the harm they will do….
The important thing to remember is that this was not a mistake. Ben Sasse protested that there was a “serious drafting error” and that people could make much more being unemployed than working. He was told “It is not an error. That was what we intended.”
When it will get interesting is that, while many businesses are down, there are some that are up. They will not be able to hire. When people are making $26/hour on unemployment (figuring that being unemployed is a 40 hour a week job), and when people don’t have to seek work to remain eligible for unemploymentt, no business will have any chance of hiring new employees unless they pay a lot more than that, which most businesses can’t do. Thus, there are businesses that may want to increase in size, but will be unable to, or may want to replace an employee who retires or dies, but will be unable to.
What about this is not perfectly clear ….
The new package does mean a good chunk of the workforce are now receiving paychecks smaller than they would on unemployment. This includes workers in essential businesses, including hospitals and super markets, who are putting themselves in harm’s way to keep society running.
There is nothing that wasn’t clear. I have no idea where people got the tax question. It certainly wasn’t in your post. What you might add to it, though, is the data that while retail sales were down in April, spending by the bottom 20% was up in April, and will probably be up even more in May.
Where the Flying F did I say the word “taxes”?
I said, specifically “The next stimulus measure needs to cap the benefit at some percentage below what people were making. “
And illegals work in many states, if not all of thm.
They pay taxes – so what?
Meanwhile, there are minimum wage care workers in nursing homes, etc. putting their lives on the line.
It’s idiotic and so are the idiotic comments asking me to take the post down.
Show me where I said taxes. then think. then apologize for idiotic remarks.
I think someone has an ax to grind and wants to believe you believe something so they can argue against it.
They apparently don’t know what a straw man argument is.
I’d just ignore them. It’s an unnecessary distraction from your point.
Your point is quite valid. About 40% of my clients have been laid off and 100% of them are making more than before. They are quite happy with this arrangement.
Why is it so hard for the people in charge to assess the moral hazard of their decisions? I suppose it is because they do not understand morality to begin with.
If you reward people to do the wrong thing, they will do the wrong thing.
It’s also because all those making decisions in financialized dystopias, are themselves in that position solely on account of having the state hand them welfare and other benefits. They have no experience with actually earning any of what they have. So they simply don’t understand it. Plus, they aren’t exactly the sharpest tools in the shed to begin with.
That’s how you, inevitably and always, end up with the socioeconomic stratification endemic to such financialized dystopias: A percent or a few on top, living purely off of Fed welfare without ever neither doing nor producing anything of value; and 20% growing towards 80% on the bottom, indigent and living off of more traditional welfare. And then an ever declining group of productive people robbed barren until they too join the second group, in order to keep alive the childish illusion that the dump they are stuck in is something other than a pure dystopia without a single merit of any sort whatsoever.
Trillions are being spent on Corporations and you complain about the fractional amount spent to help hard working and mostly lower income Americans who want to work but got caught in this pandemic. You should take this post down.
Those lower income workers aren’t making as little as people think they do.
No family, and I do mean no family, in the USA makes less than 50k when government benefits are included.
With the stimulus bill, they are now makign north of 75k.
I’m a professional social worker who works in the low income housing industry.
My clients typically earn between 15-25k a year but also earn 30k a year in benefits.
One does not justify the other.
And many on your site are poorly informed because it’s a fact that most illegal immigrants DO pay taxes. Employers are required to file i9 forms and withhold taxes. It’s fine if you want to argue they should get no benefits for the taxes they pay, but don’t tell lies. There are probably more US citizens who don’t pay their taxes than there are illegal immigrants who don’t.
And the article you posted says right in the first paragraph “it’s anecdotal.”
You do know what anecdotal means, right?
That means my anecdote is as good as yours.
Do some undocumented workers pay taxes? Certainly?
Are there others who do not? Certainly.
Besides, where in the article did Mish ever say anything about taxes at all?
Talk about a straw man.
Most illegal’s work off the books. It is naive to believe they are paying taxes…
You are usually so informed Mish so you should already know that it’s impossible to implement the complicated solution that you suggest. State systems are antiquated and understaffed and if the Federal amount is variable by person then it would take the rest of they year to implement which defeats the point. It has to be a fixed amount. So you are hopefully not going to argue that everyone should get less because a few States have higher benefits?
Fixed at below the minimum full time wage ?
(Not suggesting any level in particular)
Actually it wouldn’t be that hard. In most states unemployment is a fixed percentage of what that person earned while working. Say a state pays 50% of what they earned while working, the amount could simply be doubled. Increasing the payment by a fixed percentage is no harder than increasing it by a fixed dollar amount.
I’d love to get your insight as to how a population that doesn’t pay taxes (illegal immigrants) can possibly get their hands on a stimulus check that requires you to have a social security number. Please make my day.
I would like you to read the post and show where I or the article said anything about taxes
Forget illegal aliens… about half of all US workers don’t pay any Federal income tax either.
Cloth Masks Are Useless Against COVID-19 DUH!! link to infectioncontroltoday.com
They might not protect the wearer but they probably do reduce the effective transmission radius of those wearing them which does have some value.
That whole article seems to be about masks to protect the wearer. Cloth masks will absolutely not protect the wearer, but then, they aren’t supposed to. Cloth masks are supposed to reduce how much viral load an asymptomatic person can unknowingly send out into the environment. Everything I have seen indicates that cloth masks are effective at that.
Obviously this is completely ridiculous.
I understand people need help but I do wonder what possessed the government to decide that $2,600 a month (the 2,400 a month in the article is incorrect as there are actually more than exactly 4 weeks in a month) on top of existing state benefits is the magic number? Tack on state benefits and you’re looking at around $4,000 per month in most states. This is at a time when most folks also have greatly reduced childcare and commuting expenses, and on top of it all they’re getting the $1,200 stimulus payment.
Seems like the $600/week figure was simply pulled out of the politicians’ rear end. It’s a backdoor attempt at UBI I guess.
The trillions being printed by the fed to push up the stock market and save companies that went into deep debt to buy back their own shares is pretty ridiculous too.