(upbeat music)
- When we first started working on this problem,
and I should say, I did this work
with my longtime collaborators Marianne Bitler,
who's at UC Irvine,
and Diane Shanzenbach, who's at Northwestern.
And there was a lot of coverage in, you know,
smart, popular press,
very focused on the $600 unemployment supplement
as part of the CARES act,
and the fact that that alone
could actually lead to increases in income,
and reductions in poverty in America
in the wake of this tremendously massive labor market shock.
And so when we first started working on this,
we had a lot of pushback from folks inquiring,
you know, why would we be concerned
that there might be people left behind?
Why was the policy response
insufficient to deal with the need?
And so I just throw up a few headlines here,
you know, from the "Washington Post,"
from other sorts of outlets,
just to kind of motivate the context
in which we started this work
in the kind of early summer, late spring.
So what we're trying to do, as I said,
is to assess how the government policy response,
and the pre-existing programs that exist in America,
like SNAP, or food stamps, how they've responded,
where are the holes in our response, if there is one,
and who is being left behind.
And despite the fact
that we've been working on this in real time,
I should say, and I put it on my slides,
this kind of caveat or disclaimer,
that we're really trying to address
the real-time response of the policies,
but the data that I'm gonna show you
all take place prior to when the CARES Act
$600 top up of unemployment expired,
which happened on July 31st.
And so until Congress passes another, you know,
proposes something that's gonna go to the president's desk,
we're left with a gap.
So I guess I say this to just,
and I'm happy to talk about this in the Q&A,
but if anything,
I think the results that I'm gonna show you,
which shows some good news and some bad news,
my expectation is things are getting worse by the day,
from what I'm showing you.
I pulled down this data,
and it just shows, month-by-month,
all the way back to the post-war 1948 beginning
of the unemployment measure,
and the point of this is to say
that the increase in unemployment
that we're seeing right now
is outside the bounds of anything we've seen.
So it's big, unemployment went up by a lot,
and it went up very quickly.
So, but this is just the macro economy,
this is the unemployment rate
for the United States as a whole for all persons.
And I'm sure I don't need to tell you
that the effects of this catastrophic economic shock
are not felt equally across people in the United States.
I'm in an extremely privileged position,
I have a job I can do from home,
I'm well-paid, and I'm still being paid right now.
Not everybody has that privilege.
So, what do these unemployment changes look like
across different groups?
This is showing the difference between,
you can look at the legend here, February to April.
This is not my work, this is the work of some co-authors
on a very nice resource, it's called Econofact,
that has very timely, very short policy pieces,
with just, always has just one figure
and a page or two of text, they're very informative.
This one is showing the changes in employment,
so employment went down,
corresponding with that big jump up in unemployment,
employment's kind of the inverse of that.
And you can see the blue bars
are tracking what happened in the Great Recession,
so that was our last big recession in the United States,
and it was big, that's why we called it the Great Recession,
but it's very small
compared to what we're experiencing right now.
And so the blue is just there for reference.
And you can see across the orange bars
that through the data in April,
and these differences, if anything, have become larger
as time has gone on,
you see bigger reductions in employment for women
compared to men,
for the young compared to the old,
and for Blacks and Hispanics
compared to whites and non-Hispanics.
You also see, if you instead categorize people
not by their demographics,
but by the kind of wage level of the jobs that they work in,
you see larger, and this is really important
for thinking about who is impacted,
what their incomes are, how much savings they have,
how are they prepared to experience
this reduction in employment,
it's felt very differently for a high-wage
compared to a low-wage worker.
And what you can see is that the reduction in employment,
these job losses, are much larger,
and this is, as you can see from the title,
from February to July, so, slightly different time periods,
showing a very strong gradient
of larger losses in low wage jobs than higher wage jobs,
reflecting the nature of the shutdown,
hospitality workers, for example, highly affected.
Retail, et cetera.
The thing that's gotten a lot of attention,
and something that I've worked on a lot,
given my interest in food and nutrition programs,
and the social safety net, is food insecurity.
And so this is data, the solid line
is just showing you historical data
on the percent of Americans
who are classified as food insecure,
and the blue line is all Americans,
and the orange line are those with children.
And consistently, folks with children
have higher rates of food insecurity.
They also have higher rates of poverty.
The question is, I've got in the italics on the left,
the survey instrument says,
"Over the last 30 days,
was it sometimes or often the case
that your food didn't last,
and you didn't have money to get more?"
So this wasn't about supply chain problems,
about not being able to find milk in the store,
it was about not having resources
in order to have your food last.
And so, you know, there's food insecurity in America,
it's terrible, that's what we had on the wake of COVID,
but the point of this graph is to show you
that food insecurity went up by,
it almost tripled for children,
and more than doubled for adults overall.
And you can see through the timeline of COVID passing
that it's come down a little bit,
but it's still deeply elevated.
So food insecurity has gone up,
it's gone up for families with children by more,
it has gone up a lot for Black and LatinX families,
compared to Whites and Asians in the United States.
In addition to food insecurity going up by a lot,
and is still elevated,
and here's where the fact that this data goes through June
and not through the $600 being gone,
I'll be very interested to see the next results
the next data that comes out after the $600 is gone,
I would expect it would go back up.
In addition, we also track,
in historical data in the United States,
the share of families who say
they've gone to a food bank or a food pantry.
The data that we have, the historical data,
asks you about last month.
They say, "Did you go to a food bank or a food pantry
in the last 30 days?"
The data right now in the field from the census pulse data
actually asks about last week.
Okay, so that's a week versus a month.
And yet, there's a huge spike in the food pantry use,
and it's for a shorter time period.
So, we've all seen the pictures of people
waiting in their cars to get into food pantries,
to get access to food.
So the bottom line of this is,
we're trying to point out
that even though we spent all this money,
there's a lot of evidence on the ground
that people are really hurting.
That's what I'm trying to show by this real-time data.
First, there was massive delays in getting the money out.
So, if you lose your job on March 25th,
and money doesn't show up until June,
there's a lot of harm that occurs along the way.
Number two, despite the CARES Act expansions,
not everybody gets UI, and not everybody is getting UI,
even if they're eligible.
Number three, much more generally,
we would not call these inclusive policies,
because there are folks that are statutorily left out.
And number four, that I'm not gonna show you
any figures on, aside from UI, as you saw from that graph,
where food stamps is only 3% of spending,
outside of UI, the benefits were pretty modest,
and so if you're not getting UI, you're in trouble,
you're you're gonna be economically distressed.
And so most of the evidence I'm gonna show you
is about the first two, delays, not everybody gets it.
Okay?
So I just wanna show you a few things.
On the delays, we had new programs like the P-EBT,
like the PUA, part of the unemployment program
for the gig economy workers,
states had to figure out how to get those systems going.
That takes time.
So, number one, new programs take time.
Number two, states were burdened
with a huge increase in demand for these services,
unlike they've ever seen before.
And, you know, some states were as prepared
as one could be for that,
I think I would put California in that category,
and still there were weeks and weeks of delays,
just by the backlog of the workers getting through at all.
Some states had really defunded
and disinvested in their public sector
that was accelerated after the Great Recession,
when states didn't get bailed out by the federal government,
like we're seeing now,
and that meant the lack of investment in these systems
that now are really showing up as not helping individuals.
And so this graph basically shows you
our best estimate of how many people are getting UI
relative to the number of unemployed.
That's the red line.
The blue line is what is the part of this
that is the new program, the PUA.
And so you can see that,
there's two things I want you to get from this graph,
the first is, it got better over time,
but there was a delay.
The second thing I want you to get from this graph
is even through the end of May,
and for various reasons this data is just a disaster,
it's very hard to get this data right for the whole U.S.,
so it's only through May,
not everybody was getting unemployment,
and that's two months later, after the CARES Act.
Okay, so delays, not everybody gets it.
So that's $600, great, if you have it.
If you don't have it, it's not great.
Number two, the PUA in particular,
the new provisions of the CARES Act
to cover self-employed folks, was very delayed.
States had to build new systems.
So here's just a couple of examples.
The CARES Act was passed on March 27th.
California was pretty good, and we had it in place,
people were getting dollars a month later.
That's still a month, of a lot of economic distress.
Many other states still didn't have benefits
through late May.
So it takes a lot of time
for these programs to be developed,
and it turns out that for PUA,
many states required individuals to apply for regular UI,
be deemed ineligible,
before they were allowed to even apply for the new program.
So that adds more delays, lots of delays.
Number two, there were delays
on the economic impact payment,
and here's where I wanna go back to that point
about how high the green bar was on April 17th.
The way they dispersed this is like I said,
on April 17th, they pushed out to everybody
who they had banking details on.
After that, were the paper checks.
But guess what?
That didn't cover everybody.
An estimated 12 million Americans
are eligible for the economic impact payment,
but they did not automatically receive it.
If my income was so low
that I didn't have to file taxes,
I am not in their database,
and they did not send me a check.
Who were those?
The most disadvantaged Americans,
the lowest-income Americans.
There were an estimated 12 million of those individuals
who have to apply through a new IRS portal
that was cumbersome, difficult, delayed.
You have to have internet, you have to know about it,
all these things in order to get the check,
that you are eligible for.
And so that is an issue about our data system
in the United States,
and our inability to reach everybody who's eligible.
So there were delays,
there were delays that were built
into how the system was administered,
and there are groups left behind,
I'll get to that just a second.
The P-EBT, we were able to get data
on a state-by-state level of when the P-EBT,
this converting school meals into debit cards,
and when that actually reached families,
and so this is just looking, we had dates for each state,
and so this is plotting what share of children
live in a state where the money was starting to flow.
And we could track this separately
for those that were on SNAP, and they got it sooner,
and those that were not on SNAP.
And so this happened in the CARES Act two months later,
by the middle of May,
maybe half of children lived in states
where this was starting to show up.
Two months later!
And they they're missing breakfast and lunches.
That is a huge amount of nutritional stress on households.
Delays.
So then, the second point is that
there were not only delays,
but not everybody gets unemployment.
In order to get unemployment,
you have to lose your job and not quit,
you have to have sufficient work history,
you have to work in the covered sector,
and you have to be an authorized worker.
So it turns out that lower income individuals
have lower rates of eligibility.
63% of workers in America, pre-CARES Act,
would be eligible for unemployment if they lost their job,
compared to 87% of those of all workers.
And the reasons, take this 63% of Americans,
17% are not eligible
because their earnings aren't high enough.
Like maybe you just started a new job.
There's more turnover for this population.
7% are not eligible
because they work in the self-employed sector.
And 14% of individuals who live in families
below poverty are ineligible,
because they're not statutorily eligible
due to their documentation status.
The CARES Act addressed the things in the orange box,
but not the undocumented.
And so, statutorily, if you're not documented,
you would not get the unemployment.
In addition, even among those that are eligible,
it's a very common feature
that those with lower education levels,
and Black and LatinX households,
are less likely to show up receiving unemployment insurance
for reasons we don't fully understand,
but as a pattern you see, historically,
that's the green bars, and in the COVID-19 crisis.
So not only is this issue about lower eligibility rates,
but even if you're eligible, if you're in the 63%,
not everybody is receiving UI,
because there's hassles, it's hard to get on,
you can't get the phone call in, you don't have good wifi,
you get kicked out of the system,
the many, many reasons that can hold people back.
So lastly, and then I'm gonna stop,
is this is not an inclusive policy,
and I've already sort of highlighted that,
because there are groups that are statutorily not eligible,
undocumented workers,
individuals without a social security number,
as well as young adults for the economic impact payment.
(upbeat music)