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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

I think the perverse incentive they are talking about is that all benefits are cut once someone gets a job, even if the job doesn't make as much as the benefits gave.

If the benefits were instead given to everyone, then you wouldn't lose money by getting a job.

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Yes, but that only matters when the worker in question is faced with the choice of whether to work or not. Right now unemployment is through the roof because effectively all the service jobs have evaporated. There are no jobs. No one is sitting home savoring their cushy $600 benefits bonus instead of working, because there is nowhere to work anyway.

The argument against generous "unemployment insurance" vs. "UBI" is valid enough. But it's based on an assumption of near-full employment that doesn't hold right now.

Basically: this is not the time to have that argument.

I hear from multiple of my small business owner friends, that they are unable to get people to come back to work due to this. It's hard to know what the overall distortion is, but it's definitely a good illustration of the welfare trap where most jobs offer negative marginal utility.

$600/week unemployment, even when including state benefits, is well under minimum wage in almost all urban areas. I don't know which small businesses your friends own, nor where they are, but jobs that pay that low aren't representative of a significant fraction of the real economy (and, let's be honest: the ones that really sit in this realm tend to be staffed by undocumented workers anyway who wouldn't qualify for these benefits).

Broadly: I think this is mostly spin, and would want to see a real study instead of anecdotes from friends.

The fact that the benefits are more than some people’s pay shows how low the pay was.

Absolutely, and that's a problem that needs to be addressed, but we can't fix everything at once.

Some say that if you fix that problem first, almost everything else will just shake out

And that would be awesome. But I suspect that fixing that with our current administration is unlikely.

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