⁵One reason there is any (welfare) benefit at all, even for people who have not experienced an unemployment spell, is that the heightened risk of unemployment during a recession increases the marginal value of current income because it helps them build extra precautionary reserves to buffer against the extra risk. A second benefit is that, for someone who becomes unemployed some time into the recession, the temporary tax reduction will have allowed them to accumulate a larger buffer to sustain them during unemployment. Finally, in a recession, there are more people who will have experienced a spell of unemployment, and the larger population of beneficiaries means that the consequences of the prior mechanism will be greater. But, quantitatively, all of these effects are small.