The B-side of the relief package is the $300 supplement to unemployment insurance (UI). It is not germane to Jeet Heer’s report, but UI is not what it seems and also deserves attention.
The essential fact is that not everyone who is out of work receives unemployment benefits. Lacking a single nationwide system, the states, each with different, often restrictive eligibility requirements, administer unemployment assistance.
Pew research reported, “Overall, about 29% of unemployed Americans, or 2.1 million out of 7.37 million, received benefits in March [2020]…” Moreover, there are extremes, “65.9% of unemployed Massachusetts residents received benefit payments but only 7.6% of jobless Floridians did.”
The federal government, individual politicians, and states can’t agree on who should be counted as unemployed and who should receive benefits. Thus, from Pew, “Being counted as unemployed and receiving unemployment benefits are two completely different things, and one doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the other.”
I did not look for discrepancies in benefits paid by race or gender which likely exist.
