Are people Actually Benefiting From the Government’s Unemployment Compensation Post-Covid 19?
Or has there been a decrease in financial support?
When scavenging the official house office expenditure dataset and website, a category titled benefits to former personnel initially caught my eye. I was a bit confused as to why there would be an entire section in the government’s budget for specifically former personnel. Still, as I looked into it more I noticed in each quarter there was a section dedicated to unemployment compensation, and I had struck gold. With the start of the global pandemic in 2020, I knew many who were receiving unemployment checks at that time and so I posed the following question; How has the global pandemic impacted how much money the government uses for unemployment compensation, and how is the government providing support for those who need unemployment compensation?
First, is to define what unemployment compensation formally is. Unemployment compensation is a benefit paid to those who have lost their job at no fault of their own, and typically lasts a 52-week period, so a year. Since this applied to so many people during covid I wanted to see if the numbers had changed at all since the start of the pandemic. This initially required me to download datasets incorporating numbers ranging from late 2018 to early 2022, though some numbers are missing due to a lack of that data in the spreadsheet. I downloaded roughly 12 different CSV files, and quickly got to work, creating 12 pandas data-frames and then taking the time to clean the data with legible numbers otherwise the charts wouldn’t run. This required the use of the “fillna” function, where any missing entries would be simply replaced with zeros.
I briefly investigated the items in the category column, which is where I ultimately found the tag “Benefits to Former Personnel”. I isolated the information into another table, which only showed the results for benefits to former personnel. Then, I found the unemployment compensation sections of each of the 12 copies of the datasets that had been made and got to work. I sorted each dataset and then began merging the data frames using pandas merge. This was a tedious task as one can only merge two datasets at a time, so starting with the twelve tables I merged two at a time, leaving me with six. I merged those six, which shrunk our data down to three large tables, and finally merged those as well, eventually creating one ultra-large data-frame combining all of the unemployment compensation data from as many quarters as possible.
With this larger conglomerated data, I sorted it by year in ascending order, and noticed there were still some discrepancies with how the data was input, some quarters were labeled as integers while others were labeled as Q3 so I had to go in and ensure consistency in labeling. After the data was finally cleaned, I used the application Altair to create four small graphs, each demonstrating how much money had gone towards unemployment compensation in each quarter per year. This was done by instructing the code to separate each chart based on years and use the “AMOUNT” column as the numerical data. I also dictated to each be divided by quarters, to get good temporal insight as to how the numbers have shifted in the last 5 years.
The results were both surprising, and alarming. To preface, Covid 19 and the global pandemic began roughly in March/April of 2020, which in our data would be defined as Q2 of 2020. Before Covid 2019, there is a visual spike in both the second and third quarters of the year, which is roughly from March all the way to October. This was the highest amount the government has pulled for unemployment compensation even since post-Covid. Covid started during the second quarter of 2020, and after doing some research I found the Continued Assistance Act was signed into law in December 2020, which would explain those lower initial numbers and the far higher numbers during quarters 2 and 3 of 2021. That was an act created to provide support for those who lost employment due to Covid 19, as that qualifies as circumstances that were out of their control.
When our country needed support most regarding unemployment compensation regarding former personnel, it’s disparaging to see over a million dollars distributed in not one but two-quarters pre-pandemic, but during an event where far more lost their jobs due to Covid, the highest amount the government was able to pull was nine hundred thousand. Granted, I would love to have access to every quarter visually to run a full and accurate analysis, but with the present data, we’re left with ultimately more questions than answers. Why is the government providing benefits to former personnel on an individual level while the numbers for unemployment compensations are decreasing, especially after the pandemic? Is the government prioritizing these former personnel over those needing unemployment compensation? Unfortunately, only time can tell when the next quarter report arrives, but one can ultimately hope there’s an increase in benefits for those who need it.
