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8/3/2009
Unemployment checks for 92 weeks
Should Congress extend unemployment benefits to last 92 weeks in Wisconsin?
In ordinary times, employers pay into a state insurance fund, and workers who lose jobs draw benefits for up to 26 weeks. During recessions, Congress has often paid for extended coverage for an extra 13 or even 20 weeks.
In 2008, as the recession deepened, Congress provided 33 extra weeks of benefits. Earlier this year, President Obama’s stimulus plan offered an additional 20 weeks in states where unemployment surpassed 8 percent, if they adopted new federally recommended rules governing these extra weeks. [Which the Wisconsin legislature did.] Yesterday’s New York Times article speaks of a 40 year-old mom married with three children whose husband is employed as a machinist, but nevertheless, they are “sinking into debt.” The family is “devastated because they cannot buy their son a laptop to take to college and she cannot give her 9 year-old son money for the movies.”
Another is a story of a 72 year-old construction worker who receives social security “but said that was not enough to live on.”
I have a few questions. Perhaps you do too.
When do checks from the government become an entitlement to a significant swath of our population?
When does it become the job not of the government, but of community, family, neighbors and churches to help – even more than they are helping now?
Is it tough for families to double up on accommodations or for friends to commit to long term support of some kind? You bet it is. Are they among options we should consider more often before extending unemployment benefits still again?
92 weeks of unemployment checks is spending more dollars that our country just doesn’t have. If we’re unwilling to address the economic pain of this recession now, how much and for how long will it continue to burden our children and their children?
If Congress absolutely cannot bear to say no to more spending, should they instead increase retraining programs or small business hiring credits?
Or better still, how about mitigating onerous taxes, requirements and regulations stifling business hiring and growth everywhere?
How does government policy separate those waiting to take a job until their unemployment runs out from the truly desperately needy?
Will it take courageous leaders and a strong country to say no to still another request for spending?
Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington and chairman of the House Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, said he would introduce a bill in September to provide yet another 13 weeks of coverage in states with unemployment rates of 9 percent or higher. “Legislators will line up quickly when they start getting calls from desperate constituents,” he said in a telephone interview.
The cost would be $40 billion to $70 billion, but the expense would be temporary, Mr. McDermott said. In the deepest recession since our parents and grandparents struggled, mostly on their own, through the Great Depression, should more of us be asking these questions?
(Here’s a comparison of unemployment benefits state by state.)
Jo Egelhoff, FoxPolitics.net
COMMENTS
Jo,
Thanks, you are courageous to bring up such sensitive subjects. And I have to agree (gulp) with you. The government cannot guarantee a level of assistance to afford laptop computers, vacations, and movies.
Yet liberals would thing so.
Spend, spend, spend. And I do not have a laptop. Maybe President Obama will help me out?
David (Mon Aug 03 08:28:57 2009)
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