Read on Twitter
Another 1.5 million people applied for unemployment insurance last week. That includes 860,000 people who applied for regular state UI and 659,000 who applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. 1/ https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf
A reminder: Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) is the federal program for workers who are not eligible for regular unemployment insurance, like gig workers. It provides up to 39 weeks of benefits but is set to expire at the end of this year. 2/
Last week was the 26th straight week total initial claims were far greater than the worst week of the Great Recession (GR). If you restrict to regular state claims (b/c we didn’t have PUA in the GR), initial claims are still greater than the 3rd-worst week of the GR. 3/
(Remember when looking back farther than 3 weeks, you have to compare not-seasonally-adjusted data, because DOL changed—improved!—the way they do seasonal adjustments starting with the September 3rd release, but they unfortunately didn’t correct the earlier data.) 4/
Most states provide 26 weeks of regular state UI. After an individual exhausts those benefits, they can move onto Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which is an add'l 13 weeks of regular state UI (and is only available to people who were on regular state UI). 5/
Given that continuing claims for regular state benefits have been elevated since the third week in March, we should begin to see PEUC spike up dramatically soon (starting with the week we are in right now, the week ending September 19th). 6/
However, because of reporting delays for PEUC, we won’t actually get PEUC data from this week (the week ending September 19th) until October 8th. 7/
A reminder: PEUC, the 13 week extension of benefits for people on regular state UI, is different from Pandemic Unemployment Compensation, or PUC, the now-expired $600 additional weekly benefit, which anyone on any UI program had been eligible for. 8/
Also remember that people haven’t just lost their jobs. An estimated 12 million workers and their family members have lost employer-provided health insurance due to COVID. 9/ https://www.epi.org/publication/health-insurance-and-the-covid-19-shock/ @joshbivens_DC @benzipperer
Data reported by DOL indicate that right now, a total of 31.5 million workers are either receiving unemployment benefits or have applied and are waiting to see if they will get benefits. 10/
But MAJOR caution here.The above chart is a substantial overestimate for 2 reasons. 1st, initial claims for regular state UI & PUA should be nonoverlapping—that is how DOL wants agencies to report them—but some folks may be erroneously counted as being in both programs. 11/
And some states are including retroactive payments in their continuing PUA claims, which would also lead to double counting. This story by @bencasselman does a great job of explaining this. 12/ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/business/economy/unemployment-claims-numbers.html
The bottom line is that we truly don’t know exactly how many people are receiving unemployment insurance benefits right now. It’s bonkers. And it’s a harsh reminder that we need to invest heavily in our data infrastructure. 13/
This chart shows continuing claims in all programs over time (the latest data for this are for Aug 29). Continuing claims are more than 28 million above where they were a year ago. (But use caution interpreting trends over time for the last 6 mos b/c of reporting issues.) 14/
