[Ratman0823]

what’s the incentive for businesses to lay off their employees?

If I heard it correctly, there is a provision that would pay people up to 100% of lost salary (max $1,100 per week) for four months. Effectively, businesses large and small could furlough most of their staff for that long without harming the individual worker nor the businesses' unemployment insurance history.

[Alberta's Child]

From what I understand, the issue is that the Federal unemployment benefit in this bill is a flat weekly payment across the whole country. Some states have very high benefit caps under their own unemployment coverage, and in those states workers who are laid off will actually get paid MORE (when you add the Federal and state benefits together) while they are out of work then they do while working.

This report makes it sound like it was an error in drafting the bill, but at the President’s press briefing today, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin seemed to say this was deliberate. He said they simply don’t want to take the time to set up 50 different processes for this package to coordinate with each different state. They would rather just have the Federal government deal with the unemployed workers directly.