Senator Michael Rohl shows his Republican stripes with Senate Bill 6, which would cut the maximum duration of unemployment benefits in South Dakota from 26 weeks to 12. Senator Rohl’s social-media announcement of the bill shows SB 6, like most Republican ideas of the last couple decades, is rooted in lazy talk-radio karaoke rather than serious economic and policy analysis:
South Dakotan’s [sic] have consistently expressed we believe folks requiring taxpayer assistance should be working if they are physically able to. However, nearly every small businesses owner I speak to has open positions available for hire. These same taxpayers looking to hire folks are the ones paying for others to be collecting unemployment checks. South Dakota currently allows unemployed individuals 6 months of pay to look for a new job. My bill (SB 6) will propose changing that 6 months to 12 weeks. As a constituent stated to me, “If you can’t get a job in 12 weeks, you aren’t trying” [Sen. Michael Rohl, FB, 2025.12.22].
Senator Rohl and his unnamed cliché-quoting constituent ignore empirical data. Iowa State University econ prof Peter Orazem says job searches take at least six months. Recruiter Aerotek says 34% of respondents to its 2025 Q2 Job Seeker Survey say job searches take at least six months, for numerous reasons:
The U.S. continues to add jobs despite economic uncertainty but hiring rates have slowed. Employers are posting more jobs, yet they are not filling these roles as quickly as in previous years. This slowdown creates a ripple effect. Job seekers submit more applications, response times stretch even further and skepticism grows on whether some job postings are even legitimate.
Ghost jobs, or jobs employers post for openings they don’t plan to fill immediately, could also be contributing to longer job searches — creating a misleading perception of available opportunities. This practice leaves job seekers applying and waiting for roles that may not be actively recruited for, thereby elongating the process.
The longer job search duration may not only be due to employers hiring less aggressively. Another factor is workers are staying in their jobs longer. According to our latest survey, 57 percent of respondents have been working in their role for a year or more — a seven percent increase from Q3 2024.
Similarly, as of May 2025, the number of quits in the U.S. has declined to an early 2018 level and the lowest rate since post-COVID labor recovery began in early 2021. Job seekers are beginning to show they are unwilling to test the market in the face of a hiring slowdown [“Job Search Duration: 34% of Workers Report Hunts Lasting Over 6 Months,” Aerotek, 2025.07.01].
Just the time from first application to signed offer can run from four to thirteen weeks, and various studies indicate job seekers may expect to apply for at least 32 jobs to land a single offer. That’s an awful lot of trying, and it takes an awful lot of time, usually more than the 12 weeks to which Senator Rohl wants to limit support for the unemployed.
Furthermore, empirical data shows that longer-duration unemployment benefits don’t deter job-hunting:
The idea that unemployed workers do not want to find work and must therefore be threatened with a loss of benefits comes from a long history of racist stereotypes that portray unemployed workers as lazy and undeserving of support. In reality, studies indicate that additional weeks of UI benefits have little to no effect on job search activities or aggregate unemployment rates. For example the Government Accountability Office recently reviewed 30 empirical studies and found that extended UI benefits during recent recessions had limited to no effect on workers’ incentives to return to work. Research shows that available UI benefit duration has little impact on workers with the resources to keep looking for better job opportunities, but longer benefit duration does enable households with fewer liquid assets—disproportionately Black and Latinx households—to spend more time searching for suitable work that matches their skills [Policy & Data Brief: Benefit Duration, National Employment Law Project, 2023.11.08].
Maximum unemployment insurance benefit durations range from 12 weeks in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee (yeah, sure, let’s be more like the Deep South) to 30 weeks in Massachusetts. Other countries offer longer benefits and still somehow manage to have healthy economies:
US workers get fewer weeks of UI benefits than workers in other developed countries. Iceland provides up to 30 months of benefits, and Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Spain provide up to 24 months of support. Countries with robust economies, such as Germany (12 months), Canada (10.5 months) and Japan (9 months), provide substantially more months of support for their workers than the United States [NELP, 2023.11.08].
And don’t forget: unemployment insurance is one of the most effective tools we have to mitigate the impacts of economic downturns. Unemployment insurance lessened the depth of both the Great Recession of 2008–2009 and the pandemic recession of 2020. Unemployment insurance doesn’t just help folks who lose their jobs due to economic headwinds; unemployment insurance helps all of us, lucky job keepers and struggling job seekers, weather economic storms:
Fewer weeks of benefits means less wage replacement, which can increase hardship, force workers into less stable jobs that are misaligned with their skills, or push them to leave their communities for locations with better employment opportunities.
Business interests often overlook the vital stabilizing effect UI has on local economies, even though this is also a foundational purpose of the program. UI is an automatic stabilizer: by temporarily replacing some of the lost wages of unemployed workers, it automatically fuels overall economic demand when private spending declines during a national recession or local downturn. Cutting benefit duration reduces this stabilizing function, making layoffs more harmful to the economy. A recent study of real-time, anonymous banking data in states that cut off expanded federal unemployment benefits early in 2021 found that for every dollar of reduced benefits, household spending fell by 52 cents, depriving local businesses of needed revenue. On the other hand, maintaining benefits can have a powerful, positive economic effect: studies found that during the Great Recession, UI benefits had a multiplier effect of at least 1.7, meaning that every dollar increase led to 70 cents in additional private-sector spending, for a total of $1.70 in economic return.
When workers have the time they need to find appropriate jobs, businesses benefit from hiring workers with the right skills. Improved job matching enhances the functioning of the labor market overall, contributing to economic growth and vitality [NELP, 2023.11.08].
Senate Bill 6 and Senator Rohl’s online explanation of why he’s offering it suggest Senator Rohl is taking a very narrow, perhaps binary view of work: Having a job is good; not having a job is bad. He seems to think that it doesn’t matter what kind of job people get, as long as they have jobs. He doesn’t consider that supporting job seekers with UI for longer periods of time gives them a little more breathing room—not a lot, since no one is getting richer from UI than they did from the jobs they had and the comparable jobs they’d like to find—to find the jobs for which they are best suited, in which they will create the most value for themselves, their employers, and the entire economy.
Consider: do we really want folks who made $80K or $100K managing, programming, accounting, machining, what have you, rushing into jobs where they make just $30K or $40K stocking groceries or sweeping floors or delivering packages? Do Senator Rohl and the other small business owners he speaks to really want to hire applicants who say, “Hey, I want to work and I need to pay bills, but I will still need time off to prepare applications and interview for other jobs, and I will leave this job the moment I get an offer that pays better and matches my qualifications and experience”?
Supporting job seekers financially and giving them time to find the best jobs for the skills is good for everybody. SB 6 is short-sighted slogan policy that won’t boost work or the economy.
Senator Rohl came up with this while toking. He’s trying to get back with MAGA. Good luck. When his business goes, maybe, just maybe I’d hire him to clean my toilet. At say 12 dollars an hour. Its a living Michael.