Also - you say 2 million is OK... what if it were 20 mil, 200 mil who got paid while not working. Who would pay for this?

Well, the workers who are now unemployed paid these taxes when they were employed. So no, it was not free. It works like insurance. Having insurance is a good thing. I agree it should not encourage people to not work forever, but it is not like unemployment benefits are generous. They are bare bones payments.

When it becomes clear that there aren't enough hands on deck (or at desks, or in factories) to "keep the lights on" then we can say there's a problem.

Until then, it's good for people to have more financial independence and be able to find a job that doesn't treat them like cattle.

As you mention, this breaks down when you take it to an extreme (eg. 200 mil). But that's not where we are and nor is it where we're headed so I don't see the equivalence.

The first: For the past several months, I've been feeling the effects of supply chain disruptions in my normal purchases of consumer goods. Employment and production fell through the floor while demand in various things went through the roof. From that alone, I'd say we're approaching, if not already in the early stages of not enough hands on deck.

The second: I am probably misuing the word, but for lack of knowing a better one, I'd say there is a hysteresis between policy and other inputs which shape employment and production levels, and how acutely the positive and negative effects of employment and production levels are felt by the population, and the shape of this hysteresis curve is not well understood or characterized. That is to say, economic policy could be set such that production in fact will not meet or exceed demand, but the economy will not reach that state for a while, and we'll have a period where things seem to be just fine, until all of a sudden, holy shit, they're not, what the hell happened. So when inflation has been relatively steady over the past several years, and now over the past months we find ourselves in an increasing rise, perhaps we should start paying attention now, while policy inputs that are less likely to overshoot us into deflation are still an option.

> The U.S. Department of Labor’s Unemployment Insurance program is funded through unemployment insurance taxes paid by employers and collected by the state and federal government. The taxes are part of the often-discussed payroll taxes all employers pay

And in order to claim from it, you must have had enough contribution to it yourself, indirectly through your prior employers.

The amount you receive from it is then proportional to how much you've indirectly contributed to it.

Edit: Okay, to be fair there is a small amount that is indirectly paid from taxpayer, that's because employers who pay on time get a small tax break themselves, so indirectly it means the government budget will need to ask more of other taxpayers since those employers get a small break:

> Employers pay federal taxes of 6 percent on the first $7,000 in annual income earned by every employee. Employers who pay on time get a tax break at 5.4 percent

But this is pretty minimal, and it's in the form of a tax deduction.

Edit2: Also, at a higher level, it isn't unreasonable to argue that technological advancement and the overall increase in production efficiency and productivity gains could go towards allowing a certain amount of people not to work at all, and others to work less. You just need to change your perspective from thinking that people are motivated to work only from loss, and that actually a lot of people would be motivated to work from gains. For example, instead of thinking people only work in order not to starve, you can start to think people would work in order to afford better quality food. Or that instead of working for not getting rained on, people would be motivated to work for affording a much bigger home with a bigger tv, and a pool.

You can tell that many people are actually motivated to work for these added gains, look at how many rich millionaires and billionaires still work full work weeks.

So for this, the question would be, did we make enough progress in efficiency and productivity that we could have all work be motivated from gains, and no longer need any of it be motivated from loss?

This system can then be constantly adjusted to the current levels of efficiency and productivity and what it can afford.

So the idea is you'd see how much of the negative incentives you can eliminate for work.

Can we avoid having anyone forced to work because if they didn't they would die? Can we avoid having anyone forced to work because if they didn't they'd be homeless? Etc.

Obviously, I'm Canadian, and so you'll see that I'm biased in this model, since it's somewhat the Canadian model. But I'll give an example of the tuning, because you can tune this to quite the granular levels if needed. Universal healthcare for example is a way to say: Can we avoid having anyone forced to work because if they didn't they would die from disease or injury or old age? And the granular tuning allows us to even do things like make it dependent on the specific disease, injury, etc. You can do that by tweaking what gets covered and to what extent. Maybe we can't afford to treat fully people to really expensive treatment, and so these people would still be forced to find ways to pay for it and thus work. Etc.

Stop funding an imperial agenda that benefits the few and instead use that money to improve our society and the lives of people in it. That’s how you pay for it.

If unemployment covers cost of living better than a low wage, no benefit, long or odd hours job where in summer you need childcare and your own transportation then that job can be expensive or even more costly than having no income/unemployment at all.

A lot of commenters on here seem to miss that a good chunk of the nation makes under $10 an hour (<$20k/year) without benefits vs median CS/IT work at $60k+ depending on the state plus benefits. You can't label a segment of the economy "essential" then attack low wage workers for not wanting to contribute to the same economy that screws then six ways from Sunday.

You know, there is a free lunch in the sense that there is no point in increasing productivity when you have already saturated demand and therefore increasing demand (even through artificial means) allows increases in productivity to become viable again. We've seen it with slavery and societies with a huge lower class. The middle class and above don't value labor because it is so plentiful and therefore don't use it efficiently and end up wasting it on useless things. Zombie companies are the extreme case of this. You have so many "useless" people working on bullshit jobs that you can have entire "useless" companies!

"It would, indeed, be more sensible to build houses and the like; but if there are political and practical difficulties in the way of this, the above would be better than nothing." - some dude

What society would that be? It certainly isn't the US. Starvation is virtually unknown in the US.