Unemployment Benefits

Floor Speech

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Mr. MERKLEY. Mr. President, we have a chance on the floor of this Chamber to come and debate issues that are important to the success of our families across this Nation. There are some who will come to this floor and they will argue that we should do everything possible to help the most successful; that we should do everything possible to help the most powerful; we should do everything possible to help the wealthiest, those who already have secured the American dream. They have it in their hands.

I come tonight to argue a different case: that we should put our energy behind helping the working families of this Nation, families who are struggling in an economy where jobs have been disappearing left and right; where families are looking for work but there are multiple applicants for each and every job; where someone may be clinging to a job and then losing it when another firm goes under.

I am delighted we have arrested the slide into another Great Depression. We didn't know a year ago whether we were going to see every single month a 1-percent increase in unemployment until we were at 25 percent unemployment or 30 percent unemployment. So we did what we could to break that cycle, and it has been broken. But we remain at a very high level of unemployment--10 percent plus, on average, across this country and much higher in my home State of Oregon. I have Crook County in eastern Oregon, central Oregon, 17 percent unemployment; Harney County, nearly 16 percent unemployment; Deschutes County, 15 percent unemployment; Josephine, 14.5, and so forth.

Folks are struggling. I have been hearing a lot of stories from people back home, and I thought I would share a couple of those stories tonight to put a face on the challenge.

Dear Jeff: I have worked for 42 years and will lose my unemployment benefits after 6 months without your help. I have 3 girls in college and unemployment benefits are helping to keep us current on basic needs. We need your help in the Senate. This is our only lifeline. Please convince your fellow Senators to do the right thing for everyday families and not throw us under the bus.

That is Mike from Happy Valley. When Mike is saying ``don't throw us under the bus,'' he is saying don't spend our time and energy helping the already successful, the wealthy and the powerful; strengthen the financial foundations of our working families.

Before us tonight is a key measure in that, which is the extension of unemployment benefits for families who are working, doing everything right.

Let me share another story.

Dear Senator Merkley: I have now been without unemployment benefits since May 16. I have been unable to buy food, gas, or pay bills. My son is home from college for the summer and I can't provide for him, either. There are essentially no jobs in Central Oregon. I apply daily. I would go to work tomorrow given the opportunity. Thank you.

That is Donald writing to me from Redmond. He has been without the ability to buy food, gas, or pay bills since May 16. Extension of unemployment benefits is a very real method to help families when we are in times of great economic duress.

It is intriguing to me that my colleagues across the aisle want to take away from the job creation efforts to pay for help for those who are unemployed. In other words, they want to create more unemployed in order to pay unemployment benefits.

Let's step back and realize that it is the policies of my colleagues across the aisle that created this economic crisis. They deregulated Wall Street. They allowed the leverage of major financial firms to double in a single year. Bear Stearns went from 20 to 1 leverage to 40 to 1 leverage in a single year. They allowed retail mortgages to become a form of scam upon working families with prepayment penalties and steering payments, which is a very polite term for payments that are made to brokers so they will sell a mortgage that is wrong for the family but which creates a big bonus for themselves.

They allowed the corruption of the most important financial document that is central to building the financial foundations of our families. They allowed Wall Street to put those into securities and poison all of the financial foundations of the firms that bought those securities.

All this built a house of cards that came down, and now they want to take away from job creation as a way of saying: well, we do care about people who are unemployed. We are just going to create more unemployed in the process. The logic of that escapes me.

Kate from Covallis writes to me:

I am 62 years old and was laid off my job a year ago last March.

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