A Year of Hardship, Helped and Hindered by Washington
When the coronavirus pandemic struck last March, Kathryn Stewart was working at a gas station in rural Michigan and living in her mother’s trailer with eight relatives, three dogs and a budget with no room for error. Her mother, who is disabled, soon urged her to quit to avoid bringing home the disease. Stewart reluctantly agreed, wondering how she would support herself and her 10-year-old son.
An expanded safety net caught her, after being rushed into place by Congress last spring with rare bipartisan support.
To her surprise, Stewart not only received unemployment insurance but a weekly bonus of $600 more than tripled her income. A stimulus check offered additional help, as did a modest food stamp increase. The outpouring of government aid lifted her above the poverty line.
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Six months later, after temporary aid expired and deadlock in Washington returned, Stewart’s benefits fell to a trickle, and she was all but homeless. She skipped meals to feed her son, sold possessions to raise cash and suffered anxiety attacks so severe they sometimes kept her in bed.
Just as Stewart finally found a job, celebration turned to shock: The state demanded that she repay the jobless aid she had received, claiming she had been ineligible. That left her with a debt of more than $12,000.
“I spent the whole day just trying to breathe,” Stewart said the day the notice arrived. “I’m really confused about the whole thing. I’m trying not to panic.”
In the robust aid she received and its painful disappearance, Stewart’s experience captures both sides of the gyrating federal efforts to fortify the safety net in a crisis of historic proportions.
As the virus ravaged jobs last spring, rapid federal action protected millions of people from hardship. Yet the expiration of aid a few months later also underscored how vulnerable the needy are to partisan standoffs.
In his first weeks in office, President Joe Biden appears to have both lessons in mind. A benefit extension passed in December expires next month, and he is urging Congress to keep 11 million workers from losing unemployment aid. Democrats are advancing his $1.9 trillion plan for stimulus and relief with a fast-track procedure.
Critics of the spending warn it swells the national debt and erodes incentives to work. Supporters say the government’s impact has rarely seemed so direct: When help flowed at extraordinary levels, poverty fell. When it ended, poverty rose.
“This could be a watershed moment,” said H. Luke Shaefer, who runs a poverty research center at the University of Michigan. “We showed how much government can do to mitigate hardship, even if the effort didn’t last.”
Stewart’s experience over the past 10 months highlights the stakes. As her complex life shows, the causes of poverty often run deep, and some lie beyond the reach of a government check. But the aid, while it lasted, broke her fall, and she is now back on her feet.
In recent weeks, Stewart, 36, has been working at an Amazon warehouse and fighting Michigan’s efforts to recoup her unemployment benefits. She said she was “super happy” to no longer be at risk from another Washington impasse.
An introspective woman but distant from politics, she wonders how federal help has at once been so generous and so unsteady.
“It made a huge difference in our lives,” Stewart said. “But it starts and stops and it’s really confusing. You feel helpless when you’re being helped by the government.”
Then Came the Pandemic
Stewart grew up accustomed to hardship. She was in grade school when panic attacks started.
In her mid-20s, she married and had a son, Jack, but her husband left and her anxiety grew. “Over the years I’ve gotten real anxious — almost afraid of people,” she said.
Still, Stewart worked, most happily in solitude.
By 2019, she was a night janitor and living with her sister in Grand Rapids. Her sister fell behind on the rent and insisted they move in with their mother, five hours away in rural Ossineke.
With four children and conflicting parenting styles, the trailer proved crowded and tense. When Stewart found work as a gas station cashier — $10 an hour, 20 hours a week — she welcomed the escape as much as the pay.
A few weeks later, the coronavirus hit.
As the virus spread in early March, the need for Washington action was clear while the risks of an impasse were great. Democrats controlled the House; Republicans held the Senate. Yet within a few weeks, they agreed on a $2.2 trillion plan.
Even the poorest families fully qualified for stimulus payments — $1,200 for adults, $500 for children — and at the Democrats’ insistence, Congress greatly expanded jobless benefits.
The existing program covered only about one-quarter of the jobless and replaced less than half their lost wages. Congress widened coverage, temporarily adding part-time workers, independent contractors and others typically excluded. And for four months it gave everyone on jobless aid a large bonus: $600 a week.
‘I Was Just Like, Wow!’
Stewart was still working in April when a $1,700 stimulus check arrived. Like many poor people, she used it in part to settle debts. “That made me feel a hundred times better,” she said.
Soon after, she got a cold and fear spread through the trailer. “My mom is immunocompromised — she said you absolutely cannot be working with the public,” Stewart said. She felt forced to quit working.
As a recently hired part-time worker, she did not think Michigan would approve her request for unemployment benefits. But the new program covered workers who quit to protect medically vulnerable members of their households. Stewart received $1,250, just for two weeks.
“I was just like, Wow!” she said.
The payments ceased without explanation but resumed a month later at $760 a week, with money for weeks missed. The aid was nearly four times her lost paycheck. It was more than she had ever made.
By June, about 1 in 5 American workers was getting jobless aid — five times the previous peak. And like Stewart, most saw their incomes grow.
The 12 weeks of enhanced benefits touched most corners of Stewart’s life. She remained an anxious single mother living in an overcrowded trailer — a woman with a hard lot. But she ate better. She quarreled with her family less. She suffered less debilitating stress.
Mindful that the $600 weekly bonus would soon expire, Stewart eyed projects with long-term benefits. Transportation is essential in rural Michigan, and she spent $2,000 on tools and parts to rebuild the engine of her old truck.
The trailer was in disrepair. For $1,700 Stewart patched the roof and porch, replaced the kitchen cabinets and a bathroom wall, and added a storage shed. Her credit was in shambles, too. She settled a hospital bill and invested in prepaid credit cards to lift her credit score.
No purchase made Stewart happier than the Xbox she bought for Jack’s 11th birthday. She hid it for three months, and relished the looming surprise.
“It made me feel like I was the kind of mother I wanted to be,” she said.
Washington Dithers
With more than 30 million people collecting unemployment in July and the bonus payments expiring at the end of the month, the question was whether Washington would act again.
The Democratic-run House moved quickly, voting in May to extend the bonuses as part of a $3 trillion stimulus bill. Senate Republicans derided the cost, but were slow to propose an alternative. As the bonuses expired on July 31, new weekly jobless claims topped 1 million for the 19th straight week.
With Election Day approaching, Pelosi seemed to believe that Senate Republicans would give in to the Democrats’ demands. President Donald Trump swung wildly, using executive action for a short-term fix (a $300 weekly bonus, for six weeks) while alternately demanding and spurning deals.
The political calculations were lost on Stewart, who grasped only the lost aid. “I don’t think any of them really understand about being poor,” she said.
Without the bonuses, average unemployment checks fell by about two-thirds. Stewart’s simply disappeared. Besieged with fraud, Michigan froze hundreds of thousands of cases while it investigated, including hers. “I just went back to being really broke again,” she said.
Stewart sold possessions — a bicycle, a camera, her grandmother’s watch. The credit cards that she hoped would bolster her finances ran up fees and closed. The truck into which she had invested so much became a metaphor: It ran only in reverse.
After seven weeks, Michigan resumed Stewart’s unemployment aid in mid-September, with payments for the missing weeks. But without the bonus, her weekly amount fell to $160, a decline of nearly 80%.
In October, Stewart gave Jack the Xbox for his birthday. Rather than celebrate, he chided her, warning they could not afford it. Then he played it, as she hoped.
An argument with her mother followed, for reasons Stewart struggled to explain. Perhaps the hardship had simply exhausted everyone’s patience. When the phone call between them ended, Stewart had lost her spot in the trailer. Only a friend’s spare room kept her and Jack from a shelter.
“We are homeless,” she said.
With Stewart at a low point in late October, her jobless aid stopped again. When she reapplied, the case was frozen — for the third time in five months, her benefits ceased. A month later, Stewart’s application was denied.
Next came the state’s demand that she repay the earlier aid — $12,574.12 — and warnings that a false statement could lead to “jail time.”
Stewart had just found the Amazon job. It paid $16.30 an hour, more than she had ever made. But she worked her first shift under the threat of garnished wages.
It took the November election to end the Washington stalemate. As president-elect, Biden wanted to quickly stimulate the economy he would inherit. He said a compromise could provide a “down payment” on a larger package to follow.
With control of the Senate depending on two runoff elections in Georgia, Republicans compromised, too, courting voters (unsuccessfully) with a compromise that included a short-term extension of unemployment bonuses at $300 a week.
Shortly before taking office, Biden proposed his bigger plan, with more stimulus checks, larger unemployment bonuses for a longer duration and an income floor for every family with children. Whether Democrats can enact it before the expanded jobless benefits expire again in March remains uncertain.
Still moving packages at the Amazon warehouse, Stewart is now less vulnerable to a political stalemate. She continues to appeal the state’s efforts to recapture her unemployment benefits.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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