Extending Unemployment Insurance

Floor Speech

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Ms. MOORE. Absolutely, Representative Levin.

Let me start out by thanking you for this Special Order. And that letter is just one in 58,000 people, off the top of my head, that will be immediately affected by our inability to expand unemployment insurance. That's one story.

As you indicated, it's a person who is from Madison, Wisconsin, well educated, and cannot find a job in this recession.

I just think it is really curious, and I guess I would like to engage in a dialogue with you about this, you being the ranking member on Ways and Means, maybe you can help me understand a little bit better. Our colleagues in the majority, the optic and the narrative in the country for them is they want to preserve benefits for millionaires and billionaires. They want to preserve corporate tax expenditure benefits for corporations.

They want to maintain foreign profits for expatriated funds. They want to maintain a very high tax exemption for estates over $5 million. They want to maintain capital gains benefits, benefits on dividends.

So I'm just curious, Representative Levin, why they don't want to provide this governmental benefit for unemployed people. This is very distressing to me when I consider who the unemployed are. When I think about the people the majority party wants to preserve benefits for and then when I get an optic of the people who would most likely benefit from this unemployment insurance, there is a stark contrast. Perhaps that starts to explain why there is a reluctance, an unwillingness and an unreadiness to provide this benefit.

Now, as you know, the overall national unemployment rate dropped from 9.1 percent recently to 8.6, which is something that I think we can claim some victory for; but when you peel back the curtain and disaggregate these numbers, you're going to see that there's a sharp and problematic racial undertone as it pertains to black unemployment.

When you look at the unemployment for white men, Representative Levin, their unemployment dropped from 7.9 percent to 7.3 percent, which is very high; but black men endured a spike from 16.2 percent in unemployment to a disturbing 16.5 percent in unemployment. So those lowered unemployment rates certainly do not reflect what's happening in the African American community.

Of course, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment declined for every demographic within the white community--for teenagers, men, women--but it actually increased for every measured group within the African American community--for men, women, teenagers.

Even worse is after the fact, when the recession is over, when black unemployment won't be any better than white unemployment is right now. I guess that's sort of racial inequality 101. When we peel back the layers of this improved economy, what we find, Representative Levin, is that single mothers--women--are suffering, that they're some of the hardest hit.

As you will recall, Representative Levin, this institution on a bipartisan basis--and I understand I was not here when Mr. Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House--decided that the most important legislative initiative that they could undertake was to end aid to families with dependent children and to put women and children under the vagaries and vicissitudes of a cyclical economy. So now that we have an economy that is as bad as it was during the Great Depression, we can look at the unemployment numbers among women, especially among single women, and we can find some very, very distressing data.

Poverty among women climbed to 14.5 percent in 2010 from 13.9 percent in 2009, the highest in 17 years. According to a recent report by Legal Momentum, recent Census data on poverty paints a bleak picture for single-mother families. This report finds that the poverty rate for single moms, for people who by definition have to feed their kids every night, reached 42.2 percent last year, up from 38.5 percent in 2009, and way up from 33 percent in 2000. It is chilling to contemplate the predicament of women and children when there is no aid to families with dependent children and no entitlement. When you consider that you've got folks like the gentleman you described in your letter who has a master's degree and who cannot find a job, a mom with kids is competing in that same job market.

There is a great deal of need in these populations. Even as the economy begins to show growth, they're forced to make cuts in the family budgets. They're living with food insecurity--not enough food--and the quality of the food is not good. They're eliminating health insurance. I know families in my district who are taking medicines every other day, doing without transportation, clothing, and where utility cutoffs are very prevalent.

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Ms. MOORE. I tell you, that is a very moving letter. You say she had to move with a teenage daughter back into her mom's house. I mean, teenage kids need things other than food. Something like toilet paper becomes an issue when you're sharing a household and when you don't have enough money to make those contributions.

The other thing that makes me very curious, Representative Levin, is the rhetoric around the desire to help small businesses. Do you realize if we don't extend this unemployment benefit, economists have calculated that, in 2012, this will take $90 billion out of the economy? You won't buy that teenager shoes because you're unemployed.

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