Cutting off jobless benefits is found to get few back to work | Hacker News Reader

Cutting off jobless benefits is found to get few back to work

nytimes.com

53 pointspaulpauper15 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20210822180323/https://www.nytim...

Where does the money come from? Is it that they don’t have to go to back to work because of the rent moratorium? At some point you have to buy food and pay the utilities. What else could be stopping people from going back to work?

I've been surprised at how little money someone needs to just plain survive. Usually you can get enough from the extra that other people have. $5 here, a bit of change there. A few square feet in someone's attic or garage. Keep the place clean and be pleasant. Help out with kids and walk the dog and you can be welcome in most places. With the right motivation I could fit 10-20 more people in my little 1200 sq. ft. house.

Also, people are just ending up homeless. Going back to work costs a lot of money. Car payments, gas, insurance, tickets, parking, registration, and tolls. Sometimes people just don't have the resources to do that.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the issues with missing employees is a lack of transportation rather than lack of people wanting to come back to work. Used cars are hard to find and super expensive. Public transit is mostly shut down or non-existent. Even motorcycles are selling out. A dealership I visited recently started bringing in used motorcycles onto the floor that they would normally keep outside because they couldn't keep new ones in stock.

I've had one friend stuck riding his bicycle 30+ miles a day in 100 degree F weather just to get to work because his license is suspended from unpaid tickets. Another is borrowing my car because he can't get one himself and he's going to be waiting 6 months on a motorcycle. My partner is riding his bike as well for 16 miles since he can't drive my truck.

Hmm reality needs to read Economics 101.

(Alternatively: we’d have to internalize the fact that this happened and use it to guide policy decisions going forward, but I don’t think that think tanks will find this option acceptable)

Little early to be making this claim... give it a chance to set in.

Instead, people are choosing to become homeless rather than return to work?

They have retired, invested (or gambled) in inflation hedges or airbnbing their property out.

No one is really dying to get back into the office in long commutes to report to unfriendly, bad management. For those that could exit, they did.

If this is true, how are people paying the rent

Moratorium on evictions?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/03/22/175076784/epis... They're leaving welfare rolls, and getting onto disability

How are they spending and how will they continue to spend on feeding at McDonalds and the other things that call for other people to accept jobs? Paying rent pays very few salaries.

Im not from the US but this:

“..where they have to be stressed about their children and their safety and now they have to be stressed about their finances”

Is a weird argument, as pretty much me, my parents, their parents (probably going back few thousend years in back), every regular parent was stressed about such things.

And why ppl should not be stressed about that when they are unable to support themselves ?

> every regular parent was stressed about such things.

Stress is not binary. A small amount of financial stress is probably normal enough. A large amount should not be.

> why ppl should not be stressed about that when they are unable to support themselves?

Because stress makes people even less able to support themselves.

Im comming from a liberal country, but even here the support is only limited to the first year you lost your job.

You are supposed to use that time and money to rebrand yourself or find a new work in your field.

Thinking about it as the main source of income sounds weird.

If you don't have to pay rent...

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