People in the comments seem to not be reading the article, there’s a lot of back and forth about whether the article is looking at the overall unemployment rate

People in the comments seem to not be reading the article, there’s a lot of back and forth about whether the article is looking at the overall unemployment rate or just those receiving benefits. > The number of individuals who received unemployment benefits decline by 13.8% by the week ending June 12, compared to mid-May, in states where governors explicitly said that enhanced benefits would end in June, based on an analysis by Jefferies LLC economists. >This figure compares to a 10% decline in states that are ending benefits in July, and a smaller 5.7% decline in states that intend to keep the benefits until the funding ends in September. As we can see it’s referring to unemployment claims, not the overall rate. So we don’t know whether people are workin or not. That said, I would suspect that it is indeed due to more people going back to work. But there is again another reference to that in the article: > In May, the Missouri's unemployment rate was 4.2%, below the national average of 5.8%, according to data from the Department of Labor. Missouri seems to have been back to more or less full employment, or around there when it cut off the extra benefits. What i think a lot of people are missing is that the confounding factor here is that political choices like ending the extra benefit are correlated with lighter lockdown policies. It’s likely that these states have already been ahead on re opening as well. measuring the effect of ending the unemployment benefits themselves requires looking at that data as well.