Difficult days are coming for millions of Americans – Their unemployment benefits are running out

Millions of Americans are facing difficult decisions and are no longer eligible for benefits. unemployment. Reduce food, use money from their savings or leave the job market permanently?

Deborah Lee, an unemployed nurse living in Arizona with her daughter and three granddaughters, says anxiously: “I do not know how we can survive on my daughter’s salary alone.”

Today ends at USA a measure that has been in force since the spring of 2020 and which allowed a larger number of unemployed, for example workers with a non-dependent relationship, to receive a higher unemployment benefit and especially for a longer period of time.

At the end of March 2020 The covid-19 pandemic destroyed 20 million jobs in just a few weeks. Congress and the administration of then-President Donald Trump have passed measures that Joe Biden extended shortly after he was elected president. Now these are expiring while many Americans have not worked for a year and a half.

The granting of these benefits has allowed the United States to avoid an even deeper economic and social crisis. But in recent months critics have complained that it discourages the unemployed from looking for work at a time when employers are not finding enough employees, especially for the lowest paid jobs. After all, some unemployed people simply can not return to the labor market and eunemployment benefit was their only income.

7.5 million

Economists do not expect that the suspension of unemployment benefits will immediately reduce the unemployment rate, but certainly the unemployed will be under pressure, as reported by Agence France-Presse and relayed by the Athens News Agency.

Andrew Stetner of the think tank The Century Foundation estimates that 7.5 million people will lose their benefits.

Allowances had already been reduced or eliminated in half of the US states before the September 6 deadline.

A survey conducted by Americans and Canadians and published in August showed that in these states there was a weak increase in recruitment and income. On the contrary, consumer spending decreased by 20%.

Only 235,000 jobs were added to the US economy in August, far fewer than expected, according to figures released by the US Department of Labor last Friday. At the same time, the 5.3 million jobs that existed before the outbreak of the pandemic are still missing.

Regular unemployment benefits, which in the US last 3 to 6 months on average, will continue to be paid. But the unemployed will stop receiving the extra $ 300 a week.

The loss of that extra amount will cut $ 4.2 billion a week in household income in September, according to Gregory Dako, an economist at Oxford Economics.

This will not hurt the US economy, he explains, but “low-income families and minorities are more likely to be affected.”