Surprise! Enhanced Unemployment Benefits Significantly Increased Unemployment: Study

One of the greatest insights into human nature came from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said the more a politician insists something is true, the more his listeners should know it’s a lie. “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” wrote Emerson. The same principle applies to every government policy, as President Joe Biden’s administration has proved with his stern defense of paying Americans a federal bonus to stay unemployed.

The policy, known as enhanced unemployment benefits, did not originate with President Biden. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which passed Congress in March 2020, gave people who were unemployed due to the COVID-19 pandemic an extra $600 a week over and above what they would have earned from standard unemployment benefits. It also broadened eligibility for unemployment benefits. That policy came to an end in August 2020. The stimulus package signed by President Donald Trump in December 2020, the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, reinstated higher unemployment benefits but reduced them to $300 a week through March.

President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan allowed states to extend the extra $300 a week through September 2021, but several governors noted that virus-related unemployment no longer constituted the greatest peril to the economy; instead, employers’ inability to find workers willing to work left stores and restaurants closed from coast to coast. As a result, 25 states voluntarily severed the extra benefits last June. “We definitely saw more job searches when we announced that you had to search again, and then the discontinuing of the 300 [dollar] supplement. And we did see increased jobs in June and July,” said the governor of one of those states, Florida Republican Ron DeSantis (R).

President Joe Biden defended the extra government handouts, insisting that enhanced unemployment benefits made little difference to labor participation — and claiming that those who noticed the policy’s disincentive for work had impugned the sacred honor of the American worker. “I know there’s been a lot of discussion … that people are being paid to stay home rather than go to work. Well, we don’t see much evidence of that,” President Biden insisted last May. The president then cast himself as defending the integrity of the American people. “I think the people who claim Americans won’t work even if they find a good and fair opportunity underestimate the American people,” he said. – READ MORE