Post by Logan on Feb 22, 2016 0:23:21 GMT -6
Time to call it: NC experiment with jobless benefits has failed
When Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis dubbed the states “laboratories of democracy,” he was talking about the many differing policy decisions states make to create innovative approaches to solve public dilemmas. And while experiments yield both successes and failures, the line of distinction is generally clear between the two. But here in North Carolina, that line is decidedly blurry.
When the North Carolina General Assembly drastically slashed unemployment insurance benefits in 2013, the argument was that giving the newly unemployed a shorter safety net would encourage them to return to work faster. At the time, many, including myself, argued that this reckless experiment of cutting benefits to only $350 a week and limiting the eligibility to only 13 weeks would only cause more people to fall out of the labor market – and ultimately have the opposite effect on increasing employment. Yes, it would cut the official unemployment rate, but it would do nothing to actually help these people get the full-time, sustainable employment they need.
Before the changes went into effect, North Carolina was about average when it came to most measures of unemployment. The state had 39 percent of unemployed workers receiving unemployment insurance in the second quarter of 2013 (which ranked us 24th nationally), the average weekly benefit was $301.06 (25th nationally) and average benefit duration was 15.9 weeks (31st nationally).
Now three years on, we don’t have to guess at the results of this great experiment. If it had worked, we would have seen the share of people with jobs increase after cuts went into effect. Instead, we saw exactly the opposite. The share of employed North Carolinians actually fell well below the national average when we started out above the average. In fact, North Carolina’s prime-age employment-to-population ratio fell nearly 3 percentage points below the national average after the cuts.
Read more here: www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article61369612.html
When Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis dubbed the states “laboratories of democracy,” he was talking about the many differing policy decisions states make to create innovative approaches to solve public dilemmas. And while experiments yield both successes and failures, the line of distinction is generally clear between the two. But here in North Carolina, that line is decidedly blurry.
When the North Carolina General Assembly drastically slashed unemployment insurance benefits in 2013, the argument was that giving the newly unemployed a shorter safety net would encourage them to return to work faster. At the time, many, including myself, argued that this reckless experiment of cutting benefits to only $350 a week and limiting the eligibility to only 13 weeks would only cause more people to fall out of the labor market – and ultimately have the opposite effect on increasing employment. Yes, it would cut the official unemployment rate, but it would do nothing to actually help these people get the full-time, sustainable employment they need.
Before the changes went into effect, North Carolina was about average when it came to most measures of unemployment. The state had 39 percent of unemployed workers receiving unemployment insurance in the second quarter of 2013 (which ranked us 24th nationally), the average weekly benefit was $301.06 (25th nationally) and average benefit duration was 15.9 weeks (31st nationally).
Now three years on, we don’t have to guess at the results of this great experiment. If it had worked, we would have seen the share of people with jobs increase after cuts went into effect. Instead, we saw exactly the opposite. The share of employed North Carolinians actually fell well below the national average when we started out above the average. In fact, North Carolina’s prime-age employment-to-population ratio fell nearly 3 percentage points below the national average after the cuts.
Read more here: www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article61369612.html