Nashuatelegraph.com - Jobless Bill Should Cover All 50 States

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If the national unemployment rate were identical to New Hampshire's, economists and politicians would be jumping for joy.

But that doesn't make being out of work any easier for the 6.9 percent of New Hampshire's population living with it. Regardless of what statistics look like around them, being unemployed is no different for people who live in states with relatively low jobless rates.

That's why a U.S. House bill to extend unemployment benefits only in states with unemployment rates higher than 8.5 percent doesn't make sense.

A Senate amendment that would extend that benefit to all 50 states is a fair and practical alternative. The amendment, put forth by New Hampshire's own Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and several of her colleagues last week, points out the obvious: setting an arbitrary rate is no way to decide who gets unemployment benefits and who does not.

Last month, the House overwhelmingly passed H.R. 3548, a bill to give an additional 13 weeks of unemployment benefits to people in states where the jobless rate is at least 8.5 percent.

But the bill quickly faced resistance in the Senate from lawmakers whose states have lower unemployment rates. Shaheen and 17 fellow lawmakers sent a letter to Senate leaders asking for equal treatment for all states.

It's not hard to understand why the House felt the need to set some sort of benchmark. Presumably, the idea was to give a boost to the worst labor markets while keeping costs down. In an era of record spending following the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, it's important that a Congress factor cost into all of its decisions.

But they missed the mark in this case. Record unemployment should be viewed as a collective American problem, not a state-by-state issue. Yes, it is detrimental to any state's economy to have an unemployment rate higher than 8.5 percent, but who's to say the situation is much better when the rate is 7 percent?

As Americans collectively continue to lose their jobs -- 7.2 million since the recession began and another 263,000 last month, marking the 21st consecutive month of job losses -- an arbitrary cutoff to decide which unemployed workers get to keep their benefits sends the wrong message.

It also doesn't make sense that the unemployed in states like New Hampshire should suffer because they live in a different kind of economy.

The jobless rate has never reached 8.5 percent here, at least since the state has been keeping track, and it probably never will. The economy tends to move a little slower in New Hampshire -- it takes longer for a recession to set in and longer for the local economy to recover. The unemployment rate here is historically lower than the national average.

And, while 6.9 percent seems low compared to the national rate of 9.8 percent, it's a staggering 3 percentage points higher than just one year ago. The pace of job loss nationally has been only slightly higher, growing 3.6 percent over the last year.

Shaheen's amendment to the Unemployment Compensation Extension Act, introduced late last week, would extend unemployment benefits for workers in all 50 states by 17 weeks. She said the cost of the legislation would be offset by extending the federal unemployment tax by an additional four to six months.

Granted, the bill comes with an extra cost at a time when economists are predicting the economy is on its way to recovery, albeit a slow one. But if it's worth extending benefits for some Americans who are out of work, it's worth doing for all Americans who are out work.

Shaheen's quote in a statement released last week sums it up perfectly: "This should not be about statistics. This is about people. Distinctions in state unemployment rates may make sense in Washington, but they don't make sense in New Hampshire and they don't make sense to the 15 million unemployed workers nationwide who are struggling to get by and get back to work."

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