“I’m not a millionaire!” he said. “But if you’ve paid taxes for it, why shouldn’t you collect the money? And going from $1 million a year to $405 a week -- that’s a big drop.”
Gary Burtless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said the millionaires collecting unemployment insurance made up just 0.035 percent of the 9.2 million Americans who received jobless benefits in September 2010. They also accounted for a little more than 1 percent of the nation’s 280,360 millionaires that year.
The distribution of unemployment insurance, with 68 percent of payments going to households earning less than $50,000, indicates the program is “effectively designed,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.
The 18-month recession “was the worst thing this country’s seen in seven decades,” she said. “The state funds were never meant to deal with a downturn of this size and duration.”
Recession Aftermath
The typical U.S. household filing for unemployment received $8,050 in payments during 2010, IRS figures show. The smallest average, $3,034, was reported by 283,667 income tax filers that reported less than $5,000 in adjusted gross income. Thirty-three households earning more than $10 million collected average unemployment checks of $11,455.
Payments continued to rise in the aftermath of the recession, which ended in June 2009. The typical $12,600 unemployment insurance payments in 2010 to households with earnings topping $1 million represented a 46.4 percent increase from the average $8,606 in benefits paid to 2,362 millionaires in 2009.
With memories of the recession still vivid, many of those households remain conservative in their spending habits, according to Walper.
“These are people who still shop at Wal-Mart or Costco,” he said. Unemployment assistance “might not make a difference economically, but it’s going to make a difference emotionally.”