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Comment by gboss | Hacker News Reader

I always thought the point was to keep people home during the pandemic instead of working odd jobs to compensate. Incentivizing people to not work by paying them more to stay at home was a public health policy choice. Of course, the bills were passed really rapidly and maybe weren’t that thought out.

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Incentivizing people to stay home was a bug, not a feature. There is absolutely nothing that suggests the federal government is interested in doing this on purpose (and we might see a lot more people outside if the eviction protection measures aren't revisited by the end of the month). Quite the opposite - the message has constantly been that they want to get people out working as soon as possible in deference to "the economy", public health be damned.

Your local government's response and motivations might be different, but I largely doubt it.

The federal government is made up of many different actors with different goals. The $600 unemployment pandemic bonus was only added to the relief package because of the house democrats insistence. I think it’s hard to believe that was not their goal.

> Incentivizing people to stay home was a bug, not a feature.

> There is absolutely nothing that suggests the federal government is interested in doing this on purpose

These are two separate statements, that do not necessarily correlate.

That the government may not have intended the benefit to incentivize people to stay home (thus improving public health) does not mean that people staying home and improving public health is not a feature for the vast majority of people.

There is some logic to what you say, and it wouldn't be the first time a bug turned out to be a feature, but I think "odd jobs" are typically done in the gray market anyway, and the income not declared, so I don't think it would keep people who are receiving unemployment from taking odd jobs, for the most part. But it may have had an effect at the margins.

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