Sorry Bradleys, Wis wasn't held back by $300/week unemployment this Summer

Just when you thought the claim that continuing expanded unemployment claims had no significant effect on job growth this Summer could be put to rest, the Bradley Foundation-funded MacIver Badger Institute is raising it from the dead. The Bradleys are claiming that keeping the $300/week add-on for unemployment benefits kept unemployment higher, and says the GOP-run ALEC states that cut off the benefits in June had their unemployment rates fall more as a result.

Our early analysis showed that there is a modicum of evidence that the higher benefits did affect employment levels, at least once labor market demand picked up. We compared the unemployment rate and its changes across the two groups of states and observed that in the three months before the July 1 cutoff, the states that were to continue to provide supplemental benefits saw their unemployment rate fall by 0.26%, while the states that would soon end the benefits saw theirs fall by an average of 0.07%.

In Wisconsin, which maintained the federal bonus until it expired on Sept. 6, the unemployment rate has remained virtually unchanged for the past six months at 3.9% even as the national unemployment rate fell an entire percentage point, from 6% to 5%.

So are the Bradley Boys claiming that Wisconsin having unemployment more than 1% below the US rate is a sign of…underachieving? Do they seriously think unemployment should be 2.9% now, and the only thing holding it back was the $300/week add-on and additional weeks of unemployment benefits?

Seems absurd on its face, but let's compare Wisconsin's unemployment claims and job growth to 3 other Midwestern states that did cut off benefits - Iowa, Missouri and Ohio. Continuing claims should tell us a lot, since that'll indicate if people chose to stay on the dole vs getting to work, and I'll even leave out the fact that 40,000 Wisconsinites left the unemployment rolls between early April and Early June.

It does seem that the 3 ALEC states had more of a decline in continuing claims than Wisconsin, and you can certainly see a steeper decline in Wisconsin once our $300/week add-on ended after Labor Day.

It's even more of a noticeable trend when you look at extended unemployment claims, which were also cut off in the other 3 states.

If true, then we should assume all of those people went back into the work force and got jobs right? Well no, and in fact Wisconsin outpaced most of these states for job growth in both June and July. We took a step back in August and September (largely due to a lack of hiring of local school teachers at the start of the school year), but other than Missouri, we really don 't see any change in trajectory in the states that cut people off.

Missouri was also the only one of these 4 states who saw their unemployment rates fall between June and September. Wisconsin's stayed at 3.9% for all of those months, and Iowa and Ohio both saw their unemployment rates rise . In addition, other than Ohio, the change in the workforce participation in these states isn't much different at all from the 3 months before June, to the 3 months after.

In fact, Wisconsin had a higher increase in its workforce participation rate than both Iowa and Missouri, which goes against the Bradleys' whole theory.

But you know what has happened in the Summer? People quitting to get better pay and/or not put up with subpar situations in COVID World, and we saw that again with Friday’s release of the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS)

The Great Resignation continued in September, especially in the entertainment industry, service jobs and (alarmingly) public schools.

The number of quits increased in September to a series high of 4.4 million (+164,000). The quits rate also increased to a series high 3.0 percent. Quits increased in several industries with the largest increases in arts, entertainment, and recreation (+56,000); other services (+47,000); and state and local government education (+30,000). Quits decreased in wholesale trade (-30,000). The number of quits increased in the West region.

In fact, what the JOLTS report shows is that while net job growth slowed some in August and September, the amount of people being hired stayed high – between 6.14 and 6.40 million hires for every month between June and September. It’s the record amount of quits that kept total job growth from being even better, and give October’s blowout numbers, perhaps some of those quitters will be reflected in more hires with the next JOLTS report.

Of course, the last thing the MacIver Badger Institute and the Bradley oligarchs that run it want to see is for workers to have os, pptionrecisely because they won’t have to accept working for poverty-level wages and keep companies from hoarding even more profits. And that’s what this BS report was all about - trying to push policies make workers more desperate (along with pushing GOPperganda that could be repeated on AM talk radio GOPpuppet politicians.

Sorry Bradleys, but giving workers additional choices and security is a good thing. It didn't hold Wisconsin's economy back in 2020 or 2021, and let’s not fall for RW austerity BS and scare tactics. We need to keep things pumping along both in our state and our country, precisely since a lot of these income supports of 2020 and 2021 are being ended.