“The safety net still has kind of held up until now, and I think we have been maybe lulled into a sense of complacency,” said Andrew Stettner, an expert on unemployment benefits at the Century Foundation, a progressive policy research group. “We’re just putting people in this really precarious financial position where the damage of unemployment can just hit really hard.”
Nearly four million Americans are receiving benefits under the pandemic compensation program. That number has doubled in the past month and is expected to keep rising as more people reach the end of their state benefits, which last 26 weeks in most of the country.
If the program ends at the end of the year, some workers will be able to continue to receive benefits under a federal program not tied to the pandemic. But those benefits aren’t available in some states, including Tennessee, and don’t cover some types of workers, like freelancers.
Congress last spring created a separate emergency program, Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, to cover people left out of the normal unemployment system, such as freelancers and self-employed workers, as well as those unable to work because of pandemic-related child care issues and similar obstacles. There were 9.3 million people in that program in mid-October, according to federal data, although some experts on the unemployment system believe that figure overstates the total.
By any measure, millions are in danger of losing their benefits. Many economists warn that the harm would extend not just to individual workers but to the broader economy.
“Those households then have to dramatically cut back on their spending, they then fall further behind on their rent, and that means that their landlords suffer and the businesses that they would have been buying from will suffer,” said Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/11/business/economy/unemployment-benefits-cutoff.html
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