While Florida has gotten a lot of attention, just like Rick Scott, Gov. Walker and his GOP legislature made countless ‘reforms’ to UI to reduce spending that made the system impossible to navigate 1/
http://jakehasablog.blogspot.com/2020/05/wisgops-set-up-unemployment-system-to.html?m=1 https://twitter.com/rep89/status/1263846515706978310

Here’s the trend in fraction unemployed receiving UI in WI compared to national trends. WI fell from a 46% rate to 31% between 2010-19, while US rate was stable. Walker reforms were largely administrative, making it harder to get and keep UI 2/

Walker instituted a series of changes that made it harder to apply for benefits, similar to Florida, by making the application process unnecessarily cumbersome, including longer applications and online applications that didn't functional well 3/

He also altered how fraud was defined and penalized. If you make any mistake on your application, an application made more confusing by Walker, you’re liable for not just the benefit, but a 40% penalty 4/

The result is that for the last five years Wisconsin is *the only state* consistently collecting, on an annual basis, substantially more than the benefits mistakenly received. Since 2015 they've collected 160% of 'owed' benefits 5/

Basically, WI, due to changes pushed by the GOP, has been spending far more energy and time taking money from unemployed people who made genuine mistakes on confusing forms, generated by the GOP, than it has been ensuring unemployed people are getting needed help 6/

So to see the WI GOP tweeting and complaining about how awful Gov. Evers is on unemployment insurance, how he's responsible for these egregious failures, is honestly shocking in its brazen hypocrisy 7/