2023 Stimulus Checks: What Are The Chances of Having Them in The New Year
US consumers have spent nearly all of 2022 battling rampant inflation. Over the past 12 months, many have depleted their savings accounts and piled up credit card debt to cope with high living expenses.
What made last year even more difficult was the lack of government stimulus to fall back on as inflation rose (although some states did pay their residents their own). The latest round of government stimulus checks aimed at hitting Americans’ bank accounts was approved in March 2021, before inflation actually started to rise.
According to a published post by The Ascent there’s a reason the federal government didn’t issue additional stimulus this year, it wasn’t necessary. Things could change in 2023, but it mostly depends on one key figure.
The national unemployment rate in March 2021 was 6%. Of course, lawmakers approved a series of stimulus packages through the American Rescue Plan before this data was widely released, but the unemployment rate in February 2021 is a notch higher, he said, at 6.2%.
The One Number That Might Indicate if a Stimulus Check Is on the Way
For comparison, just before the pandemic hit, he had an unemployment rate of 3.5% in February 2020. For context, between February 2019 and February 2020, the national unemployment rate was between 3.8% and 3.5%.
After the outbreak of the pandemic, the unemployment rate has slowly declined again after he rose to 14.7% in April 2020. When lawmakers decided to issue stimulus checks in March 2021, the unemployment rate was nearly doubled than it was just before the pandemic.
The unemployment rate in January 2022 was 4% for him. It will reach 3.5% in July 2022, the same level he was in February 2020 just before the pandemic. And he expects the unemployment rate to rise slightly to 3.7% in November 2022.
