As badly as the U.S. has mishandled the pandemic, there’s been one bright spot: Despite historic unemployment, the poverty rate in America hasn’t significantly increased. This happy paradox is mostly due to the $600 that the federal government has been adding to state unemployment benefits each week since April. The program has essentially buffered workers from the effects of the economic shutdown.
But that benefit ends at the end of this week (not at the end of the month, as many mistakenly thought). This cliff comes as a coronavirus surge washes across the nation, threatening new shutdowns. Unless Congress wants to see an even more devastating human, economic and political toll, it should renew this funding immediately.
The Cares Act that Congress passed in March was by no means perfect. Much of its unprecedented $2.2 trillion in federal money went to big businesses that didn’t need it. But the provision providing that additional $600 a week to people thrown off their jobs by the pandemic was, for millions, an essential lifeline.
Congress set the program to expire at the end of July, apparently unaware the expiration date meant recipients couldn’t collect it during the final week of the month. That’s because the $600 was funneled through state unemployment systems, which operate on weekend-to-weekend pay periods — and July 31 this year falls on a Friday.
The upshot: This is the last week the $600 enhancement is available. Starting next week, unemployed Missourians will get up to the state’s $320 weekly maximum instead of the combined $920 state and federal money they’d been getting. For many, it’s been the difference between living pretty much as before while waiting for their jobs to reopen, or being plunged into poverty.
Many Republicans suggest the federal aid shouldn’t be renewed because it makes unemployment so comfortable that workers have little incentive to return to work. That argument makes sense in good economic times, and might even have made sense a month ago, when businesses were reopening and some semblance of normalcy seemed to be around the corner.
But normalcy is fading from view. Coronavirus cases are spiking — thanks largely to the leadership vacuum in Washington — and new economic shutdowns in much of the country look increasingly likely. How do you order a waiter, bartender or gym trainer back to work if their places of employment are once again ordered to close?
America faces this resurgence of infections because the nation’s defenses were dropped too quickly. The economic situation is parallel. So far, the nation has been spared a repeat of Depression-era imagery of millions of Americans dumped from the middle class onto the streets. That imagery in 2020 is not only possible but inevitable if this safety net isn’t kept in place until the danger has passed.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
