Bipartisanship broke out in Washington last week as Democrats and Republicans put down their billy-clubs and tasers long enough to pass the payroll tax cut. Long-coveted by the Obama administration as a needed tax cut for the nation’s struggling middle class, it also extended unemployment benefits, kinda sorta.
You see, in addition to putting a little more in the paychecks of 160 million Americans ostensibly to keep the recovery from derailing, unemployment benefits were extended between 40 and 70 weeks. Sounds generous? The jobless can sleep easy at night while they look for some-job-any-job since career jobs have all disappeared, you say?
Hardly.
The unemployed essentially got stroked with the left hand and slapped with the right, because under the old law—prior to the passage of the new law with this bill—job-seekers could collect for as long as 99 weeks, or just under two years.
It's not you: the confusion is intentional.
Now, under the new law, the ‘extension’ is being touted, when in fact jobless benefits were cut to between six months to a year-and-a-half.
Essentially, if you are unemployed the government wants you to look at the tepid employment situation as the job classifieds being half-full, instead of half-empty; kind of like your refrigerator after the reduction in eligible weeks impacts your grocery and living expenses.
Odd when you consider all of the other provisions of the bill will add $160 billion in debt to the national deficit. Yet the stinginess on unemployment benefits didn’t stop at ‘we’re extending the program but reducing the weeks of eligibility’.
The clowns in D.C. are nothing if not consistently disappointing.
As pointed out by Forbes’ magazine contributor Kelly Phillips Erb:
"...under the old old law, benefits were extended to as much as 99 weeks. Under the old new law, benefits were not extended. Now, under the new new law, they are extended with stipulations. States with unemployment rates higher than 8.3% (currently Idaho, Washington, Arizona, Tennessee, Oregon, Indiana, New Jersey, Kentucky, Michigan, South Carolina, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, North Carolina, Mississippi, Rhode Island, California and Nevada fit that bill) can extend benefits to 73 weeks while those in states with lower rates can extend benefits between 40 and 63 weeks. States are also allowed to mandate drug testing for unemployment benefits “to improve the effectiveness of a State in carrying out its State law with respect to reemployment.”
The implication here is staggering: not only can states play smoke-and-mirrors with the numbers (what, you don’t think they do that?), but the federal government is basically abdicating jobless funding by delegating it to the specific unemployment rates in each state, despite the fact that it was the federal government’s billion-dollar off-the-books spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that got us into this mess in the first place.
Curiously, an economic recovery is a national phenomenon and not one that can be fueled by a few strong states. It remains to be seen how negatively the shortened extension of unemployment benefits will impact the recovery when many of the jobless are still running out of benefits prior to the passage of this bill, and there are ultimately less weeks for those eligible to support the economy---as well as themselves---with less funds to put back into the system.
Read more articles by National Political Buzz Examiner Glenn Osrin here.
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