Rick McHugh of NELP offers the following observations about unemployment legislation in other states:
Ben Casselman of the 538 blog has a new posting on the current state of UI programs. . The main focus of the blog is on the fact that several large states’ trust funds have not recovered from the Great Recession and they are unprepared for the next recession.
Rather than raising taxable wage bases and taking other responsible financing steps, the result of trust fund insolvency has been restrictive state legislation in some states mainly during the 2010-2013 time period. Eight states (AR,FL,GA,KS,MI,MO,NC,SC) have cut the maximum number of available weeks of UI to less than the traditional 26 weeks—and Ohio is considering joining this club. An Ohio bill cutting maximum durations to a sliding scale ranging from 12 to 20 weeks, depending upon the state’s unemployment rate, is advancing in the Ohio House of Representatives. The bill contains many other restrictive eligibility measures, and is modeled upon 2013 North Carolina legislation. It is estimated by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission to reduce benefits by $475 million a year.
One change from the North Carolina pattern is that Ohio employers would see UI payroll taxes fall under the Ohio bill, something that places the entire burden for improving Ohio’s trust fund on its jobless workers. Even North Carolina was not this one-sided in its approach to UI retrenchment. Policy Matters Ohio’s concerns about HB 394 are expressed in testimony by Zach Schiller and Hannah Halbert here and here. Many newspapers in Ohio have expressed concerns about the Ohio bill’s approach, and while momentum has slowed since the bill’s introduction in November 2015, the outcome remains uncertain.
States cutting the available weeks of benefits attempt to justify these changes by claiming that paying fewer weeks of benefit will induce a more rapid return to work by jobseekers. According to a recent Economic Policy Institute Snapshot by Will Kimball, three states cutting UI benefits the most (FL,GA,NC) by adopting a sliding scale approach similar to the Ohio proposal, have not seen their prime age (25 to 54 years of age) employment to population ratios increase. If the rationale for cutting weeks was true, jobless workers would return in greater numbers to employment. What appears to be happening to a more significant extent is that, without support from UI benefits, more jobless workers are dropping out of the labor force in those states.
These initial findings by EPI are consistent with many studies reviewed in NELP’s latest edition of our UI Toolkit. Specifically, one section of the toolkit presents recent studies that show that some economists’ preoccupation with disincentive effects of UI benefits has not been reflected in the behavior of jobless workers during the recession. In addition, the toolkit discusses other reports that show that UI claimants in fact do, in fact, look for work while on UI and that UI benefits keep individuals in the labor market and support better job matching. While sometimes facts don’t matter in contemporary policy debates, the tide of recent perspectives is now running against traditional economists’ strong moral hazard concerns about UI claimants.
Note that Wisconsin has through substantial fault and concealment, already seen a remarkable decline in its benefit levels.
Wisconsin Unemployment 