Mass. Residents Turning to Public Assistance Programs

A flood of new applications surged into state social safety net programs in recent weeks, another piece of evidence reflecting widespread economic hardships brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

“We’ve never had a recession that happened like a flip of a switch, where literally the whole government, the whole private sector, social interactions, everything was shut down,” said Patricia Baker, a senior policy analyst in the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute‘s Benefits Unit. “In my lifetime, 9/11 gets close, the marathon bombing gets close, certain periods of time of shortened outages come close, but nothing I have seen is like this unprecedented surge in applications.”…Read more from State House News Service.