Unemployment Benefits

Floor Speech

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Mr. REED. I thank the Senator.

Mr. President, I am proud to be here with Senator Stabenow who is leading this effort to remind all of us of our obligations to the most vulnerable Americans--those who have lost their work in this economic crisis, who are looking desperately for work. They have to maintain their families in this very difficult time. Traditionally, we always offer extended unemployment benefits, but memories are too short around here.

Let me take my colleagues back a few years to March of 2002 when the unemployment rate was 5.7 percent and we authorized extended unemployment benefits for 2 years and 1 month. I can't recall any great battles month to month about extending the benefits. I can't recall the ``perils of Pauline'' episodes where, as soon as we finish the 30-day extension, we have to literally begin the debate on the next one because we understand there will be five or six or seven procedural delays built in to prevent us from doing that.

Today, we are looking at, in my home State of Rhode Island, 12.3 percent unemployment. That is the official numbers. The unofficial numbers are much higher because the underemployment rate--people who are working part time, working odd jobs just to get by--adds significantly more people to the under- and unemployed rolls. We have never in this country declined to extend unemployment benefits as long as the unemployment rate was at least 7.4 percent nationally. Today, that rate is about 9.7 percent. We are more than two percentage points above what is traditionally--going back to the Eisenhower administration--the standard of when we can sort of release and dispense with extended unemployment benefits.

By any proportion, we are in the midst of a very serious economic crisis. What we have done routinely is extend unemployment benefits. Yet, we have had fierce opposition. Even in those times when we have been able to extend them, it has been after numerous procedural votes. That was not the situation in other administrations--Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, Clinton administration, and the most recent Bush administration.

The reason, as my colleague from Vermont so passionately and eloquently pointed out, was we have to get hold of the deficit. Well, we are the people who got hold of the deficit. I can recall being a rather junior Member of the House of Representatives and voting for President Clinton's proposal, with not one Republican vote in the House or the Senate. Yet, that policy, together with the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve, resulted several years later in a budget surplus. Then President George Walker Bush walked into Washington with a $236 billion budget surplus. But it weighed heavy. President Bush felt that he had to move that money out as quick as possible through significant tax cuts, which benefited the wealthiest Americans. Part of that tax bill was the estate tax, which has been dispensed with this year--a tax on the books since 1916.

All of that dissipated, undercut the surplus, and now we are in a significant deficit. Add the cost of the war in Iraq and other operations, and the cost of the Part D Medicare entitlement program that left many seniors without coverage--unpaid for, but a huge boon to the drug industry--all of that was on their watch. Now, suddenly, they are deficit hawks again. It doesn't ring true to people out there who are desperately looking for work and need something to support them.

There is also a very pernicious sort of argument that is made--sometimes between the lines and sometimes explicitly--that people want to be on unemployment because they are doing much better, and they are inherently lazy and they want to collect that money. In Rhode Island, unemployment benefits are about $360 a week, or about $15,000 a year. That doesn't buy much in terms of gasoline, in terms of food for your family; and it doesn't take care of those bills, such as a health care bill that comes up, or tuition, if you are trying to send your children to school.

One of the phenomenons today of this economic crisis is that it is not just affecting young workers entering the workforce, or transient workers, those who have a record of working and being laid off; this is hitting at people in their forties and fifties, who have had good, hard, high-paying jobs, relatively speaking, who have a mortgage and are trying to send children to college. That, unfortunately, is the face too often of unemployment today in the United States. Those people want to live on $360 a week, and they don't want to work? I think that is nonsense. We have to extend unemployment benefits. We always have in the past, and we have to do it now.

I yield the floor.

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