BONUS - COVID and Extended Unemployment Benefits
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As pandemic-related, federal unemployment insurance is set to expire, Stephanie Desmon talks to Mallika Thomas, PhD, of Brookings Institution about its impacts, what will happen to those who remain unemployed but will no longer be eligible for weekly checks, and how the program was actually designed to keep people at home during the early days of COVID-19 so they'd be less likely to spread the virus.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 4 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Josh Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former Commissioner of Health in Baltimore City. |
| 0:20.0 | Our goal is to bring |
| 0:21.7 | scientific evidence and experience to current topics in public health through engaging interviews |
| 0:27.1 | with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public health officials, clinicians, and more. |
| 0:32.8 | If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, please email us at public health question at jhhhu.edu. |
| 0:40.4 | That's public health question at jhhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:46.4 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Malika Thomas, an economist at the Brookings Institution, |
| 0:52.4 | about the impacts of extended unemployment benefits during the pandemic on the economy, on workers, and on COVID rates. Let's listen. Malika Thomas, thanks so much for joining me. Thank you so much for having me. So I'd like to talk about unemployment benefits and the pandemic, really sort of how this all came to be |
| 1:14.1 | and who it has benefited and how. So talk to me about these, just very briefly, about |
| 1:20.8 | increased unemployment benefits during the pandemic. Yes, the increased unemployment benefits |
| 1:26.0 | was really intended to help the more than |
| 1:28.8 | 40 million newly unemployed Americans. And you know, you have to remember this is one fourth of |
| 1:35.4 | the entire U.S. workforce who by the end of May 2020 had lost their jobs due to the pandemic. |
| 1:43.2 | And the basic idea of why we needed expanded unemployment |
| 1:46.5 | benefits is that unemployment generally goes through your state unemployment agency. |
| 1:51.9 | And states vary enormously in terms of the rules that govern how people can qualify for benefits, |
| 1:58.0 | how much they'll get, and how long they can collect them. Most states aim |
| 2:02.7 | to replace around 50% of an unemployment worker's previous earnings, but states vary a great |
| 2:09.2 | deal in what's known as the replacement rate or the fraction of the previous earnings |
| 2:15.2 | that the unemployment benefits replace. |
| 2:18.8 | So, you know, in general, states with the least generous unemployment benefits |
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