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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

> the government paid a huge amount of money to people to not work for a long time

They did? I remember three teeny tiny payments. Certainly not enough to live on for a long time.

The stimulus payments were just that - extra money to stimulate economic activity - not assistance to those directly impacted. There was an order of magnitude or so more money (per recipient) available through the unemployment supplement programs, and a huge amount (meditated by employers) available through the PPP program.

I have at least 3 friends who were working retail jobs who were on unemployment for over a year. 1 has gone back to work. 2 still milk it. They just figured out how to live VERY modestly. It’s mostly trailers and video games.

Trailers and video games sounds preferable to any type of "customer is always right" retail job. Retail jobs are abusive and cause depression. They are not viable careers. I too would live on the poverty line before returning to that life.

Easy solution: pay more. Easy to get people to go back if they get paid well enough! At some point, the employer will find enough people to go back to work - and that point is what (economically) the job is worth. A lot of people realized their number is higher than they thought because their alternative was not as bad as they thought.

It's still a dead end job though. Even if it pays $100k/yr, if that's all it'll ever be, it's just not worth if the alternative is something with an actual career path.

If retail paid well, even if it was still a dead end unto itself, would allow people to save money. They would have options. Retail is a dead end job and barely pays above poverty level. They usually don't get any healthcare coverage either. Unless a retail worker is lucky or lives like a monk it's hard to make enough money to ever get ahead. One bad illness or injury can ruin them financially.

Retail could be a starting point for someone. It doesn't have to be a career. But with low wages and no benefits it's usually just enough to keep someone barely living.

Considering the median wage in the US is around 35k, a 100k "dead end" job sounds pretty good.

It also doesn't remotely sound "dead end" to me at all. That leaves you set for life; you're better off than most people. And if your partner also works ...!!

Any job making $100k/yr isn't "dead end". You don't need a career path because you've already reached the end of it. You can live quite comfortably almost anywhere in the US at that salary and thus need no further advancement. If $100k counts as "dead end" by your definition, then your definition is useless. What number would you put as the threshold if not $100k, or even something below it?

Spoken like a true tech elite. Most of the country would kill to get a “100k a year dead end job”.

I agree, but on the flip side, these guys aren’t doing anything to better themselves. They can’t hold down relationships and they wouldn’t be able to support a family anyway.

I don’t think this is the kind of behavior we want to incentivize. But you are right - we have GOT to bring some jobs back that pay a decent wage.

For several months last year there was a $600 a week federal unemployment supplement, and there has been $300 a week since the beginning of this year (it expired a couple weeks ago).

Netting out $400 a week (state+federal) isn't a huge amount of money of course.

Several other rules were also changed, but there are still limits on the number of weeks people can collect unemployment.

What I've seen here and there is that the states that ended benefits earlier did see a small bump in employment (but not a particularly meaningful one).

Massively, they did, yes. By both injecting money directly and taking away the burden of repayments. And this unemployment boost that expired is just one small piece of equation:

1 - unemployment boost 2 - stimulus payments 3 - extending unemployment to workers who would normally be ineligible (contractors etc) 4 - eviction moratorium 5 - mortgage forbearance programs 6 - student loans forbearance 7 - locally available , utilities payments pauses 8 - ppp grants

The stimulus checks were a very small part of the overall program.

Those are the general stimulus payments, the upthread comment is referring to the temporary boost in unemployment to on-average full-replacement level instead of around 2/3, along with the temporary removal of job search requirements.

Well you could also stop paying rent and not get evicted, so there's that.

There were many people making the equivalent of $50K per year, between federal and state payments. That was more than many of them made when working.

These are all expiring now, we'll see what happens next.

Did you go on unemployment benefits?

This is an important question. The pandemic response added both extensions to unemployment and additional payout beyond the typical maximum ($300/week extra, if I remember correctly). If you were laid off any time over the last 18 months, you would be making well over minimum wage by doing nothing. That's a pretty big incentive for plenty of people.

But if that were the case I'd expect to see the employment numbers dramatically shift in states that removed their unemployment assistance earlier than others, which I don't think we've seen any evidence of yet.

Has it been quite a month yet? If there is an effect I'd guess we won't even see it in the statistics yet, and that's without accounting for the fact that it takes time to find and start a job even in a favorable market.

So far the evidence is that job growth is worse in those states.

https://www.reuters.com/business/amid-covid-surge-states-tha...

If you received maximum benefits and the extra $300, then you got more than you would have earned on minimum wage. You'll receive however maximum benefit only if you earned fairly well before. So I don't see anyone getting more benefits than they could plausibly earn, if the jobs they held before were still available to them. Last year, for a time, $600 were paid in addition to unemployment benefit, which changed that equation.

> That's a pretty big incentive for plenty of people.

If $300 a week (before taxes) is a "big incentive" for people, they were being criminally underpaid before they lost their job.

Ah okay, that's the difference. No I didn't.

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