Unemployment Is Low, Welfare High. What Gives?

Welfare rolls are supposed to grow in bad times and shrink when jobs and incomes recover. Instead, they’ve recently continued growing even as unemployment plunged to historic lows.

One major reason is that welfare programs didn’t count as “income” more than $1 trillion in stimulus checks and other pandemic benefits. That allowed people who weren’t poor and wouldn’t normally qualify to end up on welfare. In July 2022, when California’s unemployment rate reached a record low of 3.9%, its food-stamp caseload reached a record high of 4.9 million—more than in June 2020, when the state’s unemployment rate was 14.1%.