A new analysis released Tuesday shows that more U.S. workers filed unemployment claims last week than during any other week in the nation’s history.
An estimated 3.4 million Americans filed such claims for the week ending March 21, according to the findings from the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
“This will dwarf every other week in history,” wrote EPI’s Aaron Sojourner and Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, adding, “The true impacts are undoubtedly of larger scale than described here.”
Trump aides fire back at press over Zacharia firing as they seek to limit damage
Convicted serial rapist originally sentenced to 124 years walks free after 20, sparking outrage
Blue State Schools Forced Christians to Keep Bibles in Envelopes So Other Students Wouldn’t Be ‘Exposed to Them’
Elon Musk Announces Plan to Distribute a Financial Gift to ‘Every Kid in America’
Trump heads to unlikely battleground as GOP fights to hold Senate and more top headlines
State Trooper Dishonorably Discharged for Using ‘Offensive Language’
It took 3 months to get inside this massive Texas data center — here’s what we saw
What’s next for Skydance after the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger?
National Guard member shot in DC, police chief says
Epstein-linked billionaire pours $500K into super PAC backing Kentucky Democrat: ‘Dirty Epstein-class money’
Booker rival who ‘shoots from the hip’ hopes viral debate moment can break GOP’s Senate drought
Firefighters save historic ‘Godfather’ church from raging NYC warehouse blaze
Arizona man accused of plotting mass casualty attack on religious site with ‘cookbook’ tied to OKC bombing
Massachusetts GOP ticket rocked by alleged drunken crash as candidate abruptly halts campaign
Trump unveils plan to transform historic DC golf course as judge tees off
The startling calculation—based on claims in 35 states and Washington, D.C. and extrapolated to the other 15 states—comes as the nation continues to experience a rise in cases of the novel coronavirus—with over 46,000 confirmed as of Tuesday—and as ordinary Americans feel the economic and societal impacts of the crisis, with schools, stores, and work places temporarily shuttered, varying degrees of lockdowns in place, and households and frontline workers still wondering if lawmakers will put their urgent needs above those of corporate America.
A graph accompanying the new EPI analysis, which is based on data from news reports from March 15 to March 21, illustrates the enormous jump in unemployment claims—even if the actual figure ends up being on the analysts’ low-end projection of 3 million claims. At no other point in the timeline shown does the figure even scrape 1 million.
Reaction to the findings was stark:
Trump aides fire back at press over Zacharia firing as they seek to limit damage
Convicted serial rapist originally sentenced to 124 years walks free after 20, sparking outrage
Blue State Schools Forced Christians to Keep Bibles in Envelopes So Other Students Wouldn’t Be ‘Exposed to Them’
Elon Musk Announces Plan to Distribute a Financial Gift to ‘Every Kid in America’
Trump heads to unlikely battleground as GOP fights to hold Senate and more top headlines
State Trooper Dishonorably Discharged for Using ‘Offensive Language’
It took 3 months to get inside this massive Texas data center — here’s what we saw
What’s next for Skydance after the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger?
National Guard member shot in DC, police chief says
Epstein-linked billionaire pours $500K into super PAC backing Kentucky Democrat: ‘Dirty Epstein-class money’
Booker rival who ‘shoots from the hip’ hopes viral debate moment can break GOP’s Senate drought
Firefighters save historic ‘Godfather’ church from raging NYC warehouse blaze
Arizona man accused of plotting mass casualty attack on religious site with ‘cookbook’ tied to OKC bombing
Massachusetts GOP ticket rocked by alleged drunken crash as candidate abruptly halts campaign
Trump unveils plan to transform historic DC golf course as judge tees off
This chart, holy shit https://t.co/luqjZ4ngsh pic.twitter.com/NeCbcOY1aw
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) March 24, 2020
Sojourner and Goldsmith-Pinkham, both research associates at EPI, put the projection into the context of the nation’s unemployment rate:
For scale, consider that 3.4 million Americans moving from employment to unemployment would raise the number of the unemployed from 5.7 million to 9.1 million. This alone would raise the unemployment rate by more than half, by 2 percentage points from 3.5% to 5.5%, moving back to 2015 levels in just one week. This spike represents 2.2% of all jobs in the economy. The largest monthly rise in the unemployment rate in American history was plus 1.3 percentage points in October 1949.
Trump aides fire back at press over Zacharia firing as they seek to limit damage
Convicted serial rapist originally sentenced to 124 years walks free after 20, sparking outrage
Blue State Schools Forced Christians to Keep Bibles in Envelopes So Other Students Wouldn’t Be ‘Exposed to Them’
Elon Musk Announces Plan to Distribute a Financial Gift to ‘Every Kid in America’
Trump heads to unlikely battleground as GOP fights to hold Senate and more top headlines
State Trooper Dishonorably Discharged for Using ‘Offensive Language’
It took 3 months to get inside this massive Texas data center — here’s what we saw
What’s next for Skydance after the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger?
National Guard member shot in DC, police chief says
Epstein-linked billionaire pours $500K into super PAC backing Kentucky Democrat: ‘Dirty Epstein-class money’
Booker rival who ‘shoots from the hip’ hopes viral debate moment can break GOP’s Senate drought
Firefighters save historic ‘Godfather’ church from raging NYC warehouse blaze
Arizona man accused of plotting mass casualty attack on religious site with ‘cookbook’ tied to OKC bombing
Massachusetts GOP ticket rocked by alleged drunken crash as candidate abruptly halts campaign
Trump unveils plan to transform historic DC golf course as judge tees off
Grim as the scenario painted by the analsis is, reality may be even worse. The researchers wrote that the actual tally of claims “could be substantially higher.” Not all unemployed workers are able to file unemployment insurance claims either, and for those that do, they’ll get about half—or less—of their regular income. The end of the coronavirus crisis is also not in the immediate future.
All that points to the need for the federal government to provide states with more aid.
“American working families are paying a large price through no fault of their own,” wrote Sojourner and Goldsmith-Pinkham. “But there is no shortcutting public health to get the American economy back to work. A healthy economy requires public health.”
Story cited here.
