This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, May 29, 2021. I'm Caleb Brown.

It's hard to talk about the trouble employers have had filling jobs in the last few months

without talking about the hike in unemployment benefits.

Ohio is among several states that are dropping enhanced unemployment in hopes of continuing this economic recovery.

Logan Colas of the Buckeye Institute discusses some of the evidence on what happens when you extend and enhance unemployment benefits as Labor Mark has worked to re-absorb the unemployed.

I am an unfortunate Twitter person. I've said that many times before, but on

Twitter you'll see a lot of complaints about low wages being offered in particularly in the service sector of the economy and a lot of people

sort of crowing, you just need to pay people more in order to get them to come to work. Or you thought 215 an hour was good enough for these people and that if they don't like it, they should go get another job and then they did.

And now you're complaining about the fact that the service is slow and insufficient at your local restaurant.

Well, to the extent that there are labor shortages in the service sector of the

economy particularly in lower wage jobs what can we credibly attribute that to?

Well, yeah, I think at the beginning of the pandemic, there were a lot of factors that were

contributing to higher than normal unemployment.

At the beginning, you had the pandemic, which meant a lot of people didn't want to go to work.

They were scared because of the virus they didn't want to go out and spend their dollars.

They didn't want to go to restaurants where they would be closer to people.

As that time is drawn on Ohio now has over 40% of people vaccinated and we're actually

starting to turn down vaccines from the federal government.

So we're starting to hit that capacity of a lot of people that are trying to get vaccinated,

get protected from the virus.

So that was one thing, but we're starting to move past that because, you know, the people that were really

scared of the virus, many of them have gone out and got the vaccine to get protected from it.

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