Title: How The $600 Pandemic Unemployment Payment Upended Household Economics : NPR
Headings: $600 A Week: Poverty Remedy Or Job Slayer?
Analysis
$600 A Week: Poverty Remedy Or Job Slayer?
The Coronavirus Crisis
'Tsunami' Of Evictions Feared As Extra $600 Unemployment Payments End
'I make less money' working than those who lost their jobs
The Coronavirus Crisis
As 'Hero' Pay Ends, Essential Workers Wonder What They Are Worth
When the unemployment office is competition for business owners
Universal basic income is here. Should it stay?
Coronavirus Live Updates
The End Of $600 Unemployment Benefits Will Hit Millions Of Households And The Economy
So who's getting the $600?
The economy now relies on it
Corrections July 28, 2020
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Content: So if a jobless person receives $340 per week in state unemployment benefits — the national average — then with the additional payment from the federal program, the total before taxes would be $940 each week. These expanded federal benefits were no match for coffee shop owner Sky Marietta, who paid her employees between $10 and $15 an hour in Harlan, Ky. She voluntarily decided to close her coffee shop and lay off her employees so they would qualify for expanded unemployment benefits. "Not because they did not like their jobs or because they did not want to work," Marietta said, "but because it would cost them literally hundreds of dollars per week to be employed." Universal basic income is here. Should it stay? The payment that came into being via a hastily passed bill was sudden and unexpected, like the virus itself. Its immediate outcomes, however, are leading economists to assess the income gap. Last year, when Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang proposed a payment of $1,000 a month to every adult in America for losing jobs to technological advances such as automation, his rival 2020 candidates laughed at his proposal. Yang called it universal basic income, the premise of which is to alleviate poverty and stagnant wages for those who lose jobs for no fault of their own, while providing economic stimulus to American businesses. And yet, within months, the coronavirus did exactly that.