Federal study: states eliminating $300 unemployment boost can expect lower unemployment

Since Republican Governor’s across the nation started to refuse the Biden (and Congressional Democrats’) over-generous unemployment benefits, many in the media have claimed that the efforts of GOP governors to get people back to work by ending that disincentive were merely “playing politics.”

You can see those states which (of course) do not include New Mexico below. Interestingly, I found the following nugget from the usually hyper-partisan Catherine Rampell at the Washington Post. To be fair, she actually quotes from a recent working paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

They estimated that in “each month in early 2021, about seven out of 28 unemployed individuals receive job offers that they would normally accept, but one of the seven decides to decline the offer due to the availability of the extra $300 per week in [unemployment] payments.”

So,  if New Mexico were to reject the “Biden stimulus” and 1 of these 7 workers were to take a job they wouldn’t have EVERY MONTH, New Mexico would put a pretty good dent in its 3rd-highest-in-the-nation 8.2% unemployment rate.