What is the relationship between unemployment and poverty?
Loosely correlated but not exact. Unemployment insurance income counts as income and your former salary (thus the amount you paid in to the system) might be much higher than the poverty level of income. Also, you might be in a two-income household and your spouse could make six figures. This actually happened to a LOT of people after Greenspan pricked the NASDAQ bubble that he had created in the first place. You had a husband and wife in tech and one lost their job and looked for another and did occasional consulting work while collecting unemployment. By the time the benefits ran out, interest rates were so low that the couple refinanced their mortgage and now it made sense for one of them to stay at home and pull the kids out of daycare.
