Read the text and do the tasks
The Cost of Lost Income to Working Families
1. The average duration of unemployment from 1975 to 2000 varied between eleven and twenty weeks and averaged about three and one-half months (Economic Report of the President 2000, 356). Because of the tendency of official statistics to exclude discouraged workers, the real duration was probably higher.
2. Despite the high level of consumption in the U.S. economy most working people have very little financial savings. The bottom half of the income ladder would be unable to maintain a standard of living 25 percent above the poverty line by relying on their financial savings for even two months. Although many families have more than one wage earner and other survival options (such as loans from relatives, home equity loans, high-interest credit card debt, and expanded household production), the financial burden of unemployment can obviously be quite high.
3. The social support system for the unemployed has two major components, unemployment insurance and the social safety net. Over the last twenty-five years there has been a reduction in unemployment insurance. From 1980 to 1999, coverage fell from 43.9 percent to 37.2 percent of the unemployed. State unemployment insurance payments fell from 36.6 percent to 31.6 percent of lost wages. Because there have been many different changes in the social safety net, it is difficult to say how the overall level of social insurance has changed. If we use «government expenditures for income-tested benefits» as a proxy for safety net spending, it appears the net strengthened a bit.
4. Unemployment often has serious psychological impacts in addition to its economic burdens. A recent review of empirical research on happiness in the Journal of Economic Literature reported that «Happiness research suggests that unemployment strongly reduces subjectively self-reported well-being, both personally and for society as a whole. This is… in line with the view that unemployment is involuntary for the bulk of people affected» (Frey and Stutzer 2002, 428).
(Steven Mark Cohn: Reintroducing macroeconomics (a critical approach). – M.E. Sharp. Inc., 2007. – 368 p)
Define the statement which corresponds to the contents of the text.
The author supports the idea that state unemployment insurances payments have increased over 25 years.
On the whole most working people in the US have enough financial savings because of high level of consumption.
The research results mentioned by the author show that happiness and unemployment are not correlated.
The author considers that the unemployment period in the 1990s has lasted approximately for twenty weeks.