| On this side of the pond unemployment is mostly 13-26 weeks of a fraction of the money you earned previously and requires you to be actively seeking and available for work. You can neither be volunteering nor pursuing education even if you are laid off and need training in another field. In some particularly stingy places this is as little as the equivalent of 80 pounds per week whereas rent is oft closer to 800 pounds per month. In many cases its something you receive later after weeks or months of bureaucratic wrangling after you would long ago have lost your housing if you didn't have any of your own money saved. Hell we make sure you can't exploit the system by getting food stamps or housing help while going to college even if you are poor as a church mouse. Heck we set the benefits threshold low enough that as you move from part time employment to full time employment the poorest households experience a hump where if you move to full time you may end up poorer than you started because you lose more benefits than you gain income. This is especially true if you go from free medical care to $500-$800 out of pocket. Because most professions don't involve doubling your wages regularly one has to in effect agree to take on more work to climb into greater poverty in order to work your way out the other side IF increasing costs ever let you get ahead in the first place. One of the most attractive ways OUT of permanent poverty is naturally a college education however this will almost certainly be by way of borrowing tens of thousands of dollars but since you don't qualify for benefits during your education and you need to keep eating and living inside you are liable to need to continue to work full time which creates a much higher chance of failure which stands to leave you without a degree with thousands of dollars of undischargable debt. This concludes our tour of one of the shitty parts of America. |