HIRE Act: Overview..

Beginning in 2008, an economic downturn led to the elimination of many jobs across all sectors. While the historical data available from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the national unemployment rate can vary significantly from month to month and year to year, there have only been a few spikes as significant as the one produced by that downturn. In more than seventy years of historical data, the unemployment rate in 2009 and 2010 (9.3 and 9.6 percent, respectively) was matched or surpassed only in 1982 (9.7 percent) and 1983 (9.6 percent). The economy recovered slowly, with the annual unemployment rate still at 7.4 percent in 2013—higher than any year between 1993 and 2008. The federal government enacted a number of significant legislative efforts to help individuals make ends meet while they searched for new employment or received new job training. One of the most prominent of these was the 2010 Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act.