Spurious comparison

Here's what Grant Robertson said at noon today:

He said 40,000 people had signed up for the jobseeker benefit since 20 March.
Robertson said the increased number of people on the benefit represented 0.8 percent of the country's total population.
"For comparison, in the United States, they have had new jobless claims relating to Covid-19 of 33 million, or 10 percent of their population."

The elephant in the room is the wage subsidy. Yes NZ has fortunately not had a huge call on the jobseeker benefit yet because of the 1.7 million wage subsidies being paid out.
Which totally muddies the picture.

Even when the subsidy ceases there will be a lag while WINZ makes covid-response collateral use any redundancy, sick and annual leave payments before 'commencement day' begins.

I don't even know why Robertson brought it up. Just another instance of treating us like numpties.

Update. I checked out the rule re redundancy payments before I wrote this post. Now it would appear that WINZ has been acting unlawfully in taking redundancy payments into account. Good sleuthing on someone's part.