There were 6.6M new UI claims, bringing the 3 week total to around 17M.
— Arindrajit Dube (@arindube) April 9, 2020
These are staggering numbers.
But for many of these workers, jobs are on a pause, not destroyed. And we are providing recipients with much more generous UI benefits during this pause, which is good.
The numbers aren't precisely comparable, but there have been 16 million new jobless claims in the past 3 weeks and the total net job losses during The Great Recession were... 8.7 million. If we're gonna just take a little break and then go back to our old lives, how come it took 6 years to get back to the beginning during the Great Recession? It is true that, contrary to the myths made by the people who did it, the policy response was sadistic and disastrous. Solving the Great Recession should have been easy (if not painless), but some people needed to suffer for the sins of bankers, and so they did. It was actually an easy problem and they failed spectacularly.
This is a hard problem. A much harder problem. And I do not think the people currently in charge are likely to be either smarter or more well-intentioned.
A few weeks away from blaming unemployment on the unemployed. It'll start on Fox and in the WSJ but spread everywhere.