I agree it’s certainly not socially equitable. Laid-off non-essential workers receive an undeserved pay raise for doing no work, and essential workers receive n

I agree it’s certainly not socially equitable. Laid-off non-essential workers receive an undeserved pay raise for doing no work, and essential workers receive no benefit for continuing to work despite the hazards involved. Mandating hazard pay would be fairer, yes, but has consequences of its own — e.g., some essential employers at the margins of profitability become insolvent, causing less essential work to be done. I’m only saying that as an emergency measure, where your chief concern is short-term continuation of essential work and discontinuation of non-essential work that incentivizes people to leave home, raising UI benefit helps achieve that. Layoffs act as a useful indicator of whether a given pre-pandemic job is actually essential to preserve, and laid-off workers are more tangibly in need of assistance to avoid cascading problems (tenants failing to pay rent, landlords failing to pay property tax, REITs collapsing, pensioners not getting paid, etc.). Giving a windfall to the unemployed is obviously counterproductive in a normal economy, but in the short-term it does solve some problems. Also airdropping money to low-income essential workers would make things more fair, but these workers are not generally facing eviction. Your point about hour reductions may be true in some states — I’m not sure — but at least in mine (New York) workers receive unemployment insurance for any reduction that drops their pay by more than 20%, with benefits proportional to the reduction in hours.