The average unemployment benefit is $295 a week. A 40 hour a week minimum wage job makes $290 gross per week. So even if some conservatives do not abolish the minimum wage
[1] there is little incentive to work for minimum wage. However most are not getting fat off of unemployment benefits.
A fraction of a paycheck
The goal of the unemployment insurance program, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, is to provide people with about half their normal wage. However, it almost never works out that way. The average American collected $295 in weekly unemployment benefits in the third quarter of 2010, according to the most recent government data. But the average weekly salary in that same quarter was $865, which means the jobless benefits replaced just over a third of the average worker's salary.
In fact, even as Congress has successfully extended the length of time one can collect jobless benefits four different times in recent years, from 26 weeks to 99 weeks, the actual amount that the average person collects relative to the wage he or she earned before becoming unemployed has slightly decreased. In 2007, before the recession began, unemployment benefits compensated for 35.6% of one's last salary. In the third quarter of 2010, that number was 34.2%.
Part of the problem, according to Rebecca Dixon, a policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, a national advocacy group for low-wage workers, is that only a handful of states actually adjust the amount of benefits offered to meet annual increases in wages. In the states that do, like Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Kentucky, benefits tend to be significantly higher and come closer to meeting the standard of living that workers might have grown accustomed to. New Jersey, for example, offers maximum jobless benefits of $598 a week, nearly twice the national average.
But whether you're living on half your normal salary or a third of it, getting by on these benefits alone is nearly impossible.[MSN]
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