JUNE 2009 Unemployment Benefits By State This table provides a complete list of unemployment benefits and duration for all 50 states. The table provides the maximum dollar amount per week provided by each state and also the maximum number of weeks benefits are provided. State Max weekly payment Max # of weeks Alabama $255 59 Alaska $370-442 79 Arizona $240 72 Arkansas $431 72 California $450 79 Colorado $431-475 72 Connecticut $519-594 72 Delaware $330 59 Florida $275 79 Georgia $330 79 Hawaii $545 59 Idaho $363 72 Illinois $385-534 72 Indiana $390 79 Iowa $361-443 46 Kansas $423 59 Kentucky $415 79 Louisiana $284 46 Maine $344-516 72 Maryland $380 59 Massachusetts$628-942 72 HIGHEST Michigan $362 79 Minnesota $351-566 79 Mississippi $230 59 Missouri $320 79 Montana $407 72 Nebraska $308 46 Nevada $393 79 New Hampshire $427 59 New Jersey $584 79 New Mexico $359-459 46 New York $405 72 North Carolina $494 79 North Dakota $406 46 Ohio $370-503 79 Oklahoma $409 46 Oregon $482 79 Pennsylvania $558-566 72 Rhode Island $528-660 79 South Carolina $326 72 South Dakota $298 46 Tennessee $275 59 Texas $392 59 Utah $444 46 Vermont $425 72 Virginia $378 72 Washington $541 79 Washington, D.C. $359 79 West Virginia $424 59 Wisconsin $363 79 Wyoming $415 46 Average $410 67.33
My friend in CA gets exactly $450/wk, as indicated above. However what I do not understand is this: do those figure indicate that the benefits can be paid for 79 weeks? You can get unemployment for 1.5 years? Am I missing something here? Thanks!
I'm already bearish and short this market, but i wonder if we could find out when most of the claims expire (YES, 1.5 YEARS from beginning) and then see how consumer spending is affected. i would guess if you go bankrupt they can't take your government monies, and i wonder if people file 7 or 11 or whatever and then get all this money. MASS up to 1k a week??
Shit I should have got laid off in MA and not FL. So on average it is better to collect unemployment than work 40 hours a week at a job that pays 10.25 an hour for the next year and a half, not accounting for the value of 40 hours of free time every week. So if you qualify for max benefits but cant find anything but work for $10/hr (this is ALOT of people and my personal experience), you might as well sit on your ass till its worth your while. Holy shit man.
It's worse, man. When I was making $15/hr, my take-home was around $1800. My friend (who gets $450/wk unemployment), makes the same as I was while working 40 Hrs/week for $15/Hr!
but buddy... your friend has to pay taxes on it at the end of the year.. SO if he was laid off mid year. and would have had income plus severance package, that all adds up.. also see this article about condition in DETROIT======== http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124718194179420129.html# JULY 10, 2009 Detroit's Food Banks Strain to Serve Middle Class Charities in the Region Struggle to Cope With a Surge in Demand as Once-Stable Families Seek Assistance Detroit Battered by massive layoffs, home foreclosures and nearly a decade of economic decline, more residents of Detroit's middle-class suburbs are having a tough time putting food on the table. State agencies and nonprofit groups that serve the poor in southeast Michigan say they are seeing an unprecedented rise in demand for food assistance across the region. They point to a pronounced increase in those seeking aid for the first time, often families unaccustomed to depending on food-aid programs. And they expect the numbers to grow as Michigan's jobs picture worsens. View Slideshow [SB124717457165719693] Brett Mountain/Rapport for The Wall Street Journal Cheryl Johnson of Pontiac and Virginia Johnson of Rochester loaded up their car with food they received at God's Helping Hands food pantry in Rochester Hills, Mich. Wednesday. "We're going to see pretty significant increases," says DeWayne Wells, president of Gleaners Community Food Bank of Southeast Michigan, the largest food bank in the state. "We are even hearing from many people that, a year or two ago, used to be financial donors to the pantry." Michigan has long struggled with poverty and unemployment in its urban areas. But the spread of financial hardship has been jarring for a region where the manufacturing-based economy once provided for high wages and comfortable middle-class lifestyles. Jeff Holler said he broke down in tears when he and his wife, Velina, stepped into the Lighthouse food pantry near their home in affluent Oakland County in late May. Mr. Holler, an environmental engineer with a master's degree, had lost his $75,000-a-year job at a technology company a month earlier. "It was hard to take," recalls Mr. Holler, 52 years old, who says he spotted a longtime friend at the same center and tried to avoid being seen. "I've never had to do anything like this in my life." The Hollers, who have a 21-year-old son in college, are eligible to get food from Lighthouse once a month. They haven't been back since their visit in May, but they say they will if they must. "To me, the feeling has nothing to do with it anymore," says Mr. Holler, who has struggled to find steady work for a couple of years. "My son's not going to go hungry. My wife's not going to go hungry." The problem is likely to get markedly worse in the coming months. Michigan, where the 14.1% unemployment rate is the highest in the nation, faces still more layoffs in its principal industries: auto manufacturing, which is in the midst of a sweeping restructuring, and the health-care business, which is reeling from the auto makers' benefit cuts. [Detroit's Food Banks Strain to Serve ] Brett Mountain/Rapport for The Wall Street Journal More residents of suburban Detroit are relying on food banks. Above, Dan Smith helps a food-pantry visitor in Rochester Hills, Mich., load supplies. Moreover, state officials warn of a surge in the number of long-term unemployed workers who will exhaust the extended jobless benefits that until now helped them afford necessities like food. By the end of the year, roughly 100,000 residents will have lost their benefits, according to the state's unemployment insurance agency. "It's going to be a jump in terms of the number of people that are affected, and that's certainly something we're very concerned about," says Jean Daniel, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which provides about 20% of the food distributed in food banks nationwide. In May, the caseload for Michigan's Food Assistance Program, which administers the USDA's food-stamp aid for the state, rose to 718,277 households, up 3.1% from April and nearly triple what it was at the start of the decade. Meanwhile, local food banks are straining to serve the expanding need. These privately run distribution sites, which depend on private and government food donations and serve families who might not qualify for government aid, are typically the first line of defense for families at risk of skipping meals or going without entirely. Gleaners, which distributed 28 million pounds of food last year to smaller nonprofits, said demand for its services is up nearly 20% this year -- and closer to 30% in the suburbs of Detroit. Facing a decline in support from local donors, Gleaners said it was lucky to see its allotment of USDA food contributions more than double in the first half of this year, to more than five million pounds. The USDA says its shipments included such staples as chicken, peanut butter, dry milk, beans, eggs and applesauce. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal stimulus money has helped Gleaners and other private agencies fill the gap, too. "Some of the areas where we're seeing some of the strongest need is where we don't have a network of agencies," says Gleaners's Mr. Wells. Until recently, he says, there was little demand for food aid in those neighborhoods. In Plymouth, a western suburb of Detroit that is home to a large community of auto industry employees, Trinity Presbyterian Church began distributing food to needy families late last year, says Mr. Wells, whose group supplied the food. The church had expected to serve about 200 families a month, but has seen more than three times that number show up in recent months. "What a crisis like this points out is that this can happen to anyone," says Mr. Wells. In Dearborn Heights, a suburban neighborhood near Ford Motor Co.'s headquarters, one mother of two says she made her first visit to a food pantry last month, after her husband lost his job as a mechanic making between $50,000 and $60,000 a year, causing the family's finances to unravel. The couple had signed a lease on a 2009 Ford Taurus just weeks before the layoff. "I remember sitting there in the parking lot going, 'I can't believe this,'" says the woman, who asked not to be identified. She said she didn't initially tell her husband that she had gone to a food bank for help, and that the rest of her family still doesn't know. They are scraping by on income from her part-time job, which pays less than $12,000 a year, and her husband's $360 a month in unemployment benefits. Fish & Loaves, a food pantry in the working-class suburb of Taylor, drew in Amy Marsh, a stay-at-home mother of three young children whose husband lost his retail job in mid-May. He had earned $2,200 a month at a local Best Buy. She went home with about 110 pounds of food -- or about two months' worth -- including eggs, ham, pork, ground-pork patties, frozen chicken and canned vegetables. "It's like absolute failure," Ms. Marsh said of the experience. "I don't anticipate getting comfortable doing this at any point. It's just not in my blood." The influx of newcomers has left food-aid agencies ill-prepared in some areas. Dubrae Newman, who coordinates the emergency food-assistance program for Oakland Livingston Human Service Agency in Detroit's northwest suburbs, says the nonprofit is helping at least 600 more families than it did at the beginning of the year, and supplies are tight at some food pantries served by the organization.
Unemployment benefits should at most be about 30% of minimum wage and for no more that 4 months. This will give the unemployed the incentive to take a minimum wage job instead of sitting on their butt watching tv... What is this country coming to?:eek:
This explains an incident that I witnessed the other day here in metro west Boston. I was at a neighbor's party and all their family was over, poor relations included, and I was speaking to the family's matriarch and her sisters when this young kid comes over and tells the old dears that he was just laid off. I started to express my sympathy, and was even thinking about possibly offering him a temp position in one of my businesses to help him out, when they all said, with big smiles on their faces, "Great, now you get to sign on for the summer!" I thought perhaps they were just trying to be positive for the guy, but as the conversation went on I could see that this was not the case and that they were genuinely happy for him that he was going to be able to enjoy the summer and not have to worry about work. Now I see the MA benefits I understand the reaction if not the mentality. Meanwhile MA is cutting healthcare to its poorest citizens and schools in many areas are in despicable states of repair, still, despite the economy, starbucks and whole foods are always full of young people who can spend their (my tax) money and days there. I think they must have coined the term funemployment here in MA.