Employment
With unemployment benefits cut off in many states, Americans returned to work, right?
![President Joe Biden discusses the economy, jobs and infrastructure in May in Cleveland.](https://cdn.statically.io/img/www.usatoday.com/gcdn/presto/2021/05/27/USAT/cef8f63b-c513-4d30-93c7-77249c6aef7e-DESK.00_00_46_13.Still003.jpg?width=980&height=552&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp)
Critics blamed overly generous unemployment benefits for a labor shortage afflicting businesses and argued that ending the extra assistance would force many Americans to go back to work.
But that didn’t happen.
States that ended a federal boost to jobless benefits early experienced virtually the same drop in unemployment this summer as states that maintained the extra assistance, according to a new analysis.
From June to August, the jobless rate in states that cut off a weekly $300 federal supplement to state unemployment benefits dipped by 0.25%, compared with a 0.26% drop in states that continued the benefit, according to an analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.