On September 6, pandemic unemployment benefits were eliminated across the entire country. As a result, 8 million people were removed from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PUEC) programs and thus saw their benefit incomes drop to $0.

The stated purpose of cutting these benefits was to get people back to work. The idea was that pandemic unemployment benefits have been keeping people from accepting jobs and that cutting the benefits would therefore result in large employment gains.

This did not work when half of the states cut pandemic unemployment benefits over the summer and it did not work in September when they were cut nationwide.

According to the September jobs report, employers only added 194,000 jobs last month. This was the worst month of job growth since Biden became president and the second-worst since May of last year when the pandemic labor market recovery began.

194,000 jobs is equal to less than 3 percent of the people who were removed from the UI rolls in September. At this rate, it would take 3.5 years for jobs-added to equal the number of people who lost their pandemic UI benefits.

The management of UI in the last 6 months has been a complete disaster.