NPR
What’s In It For You? $1,200 Checks, 13 Weeks Of Unemployment Payments And More
First-time jobless claims hit nearly 3.3 million last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. That’s staggering when you consider that at the height of the Great Recession, initial claims topped out at just shy of 700,000.
The legislation that the Senate passed Wednesday night is set to provide $2 trillion in economic aid as the nation braces for this massive economic blow.
“We’re living in an emergency situation. In an ideal world, we would have time to create adjusted cost-of-living amounts for everywhere in the country based on pretty specific data as to what it costs to raise what type of children, you know, which number of children and which state,” said Amy Castro Baker, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania who studies basic-income programs. “We don’t have that kind of time. People are losing their houses yesterday.”