If your family’s food is covered by food stamps, you get a check for each kid, your housing is Section 8, and the gov’t is providing you a free cell phone and subsidies on the already-subsidizes trains and buses, what costs do you really have?
Add to it that their useless 36% “average” unemployment check comes from the fact that if you made 100k your unemployment is a small fraction of that, but if you your income is low you get almost the whole thing (think it’s 80% or more here), it’s enough for plenty of people to keep living comfy, hood-rich lifestyles funded by our paychecks.
If you make $100k in New Hampshire, your unemployment isn't enough to pay your mortgage and property tax each month. It actually comes to about 10% of your income here: the maximum possible benefit is about $11,000 if you made anything over $41,500 in the base period.
My wife and I are still recovering in some ways a year later from one month of unemployment insurance and four months of full COBRA premiums to cover the cataract surgery she was halfway through.