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The Detroit News
April 14, 2008 |
Deb Price
Staff Writer |
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Jobless benefits May Extend
Bill proposes 13-week extension for unemployed |
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A push is under way in Congress to extend unemployment benefits, with even greater help targeted to Michigan and other states with the highest unemployment rates.
A bipartisan bill in the House proposes to extend jobless benefits for 13 weeks, plus an additional 13 weeks for states with an employment rate of 6 percent or higher. Currently, workers get jobless benefits for up to 26 weeks.
Michigan continues to lead the nation in terms of the highest unemployment rate at 7.2 percent. The national average is 5.1 percent.
For Howard Thompson, a 49-year-old skilled tradesman from Royal Oak, this week marks the last week of unemployment benefits.
"Then I'm all done. They should increase it for people who are running out," Thompson said. "The biggest thing is they are letting our jobs go overseas, so they should do something for people here at home."
"I think action will occur in a short period of time," said U.S. Rep. Sander Levin, a senior member of the Ways and Means Committee.
"This extension matters a lot to people in Michigan."
A Ways and Means subcommittee held a hearing on the proposal last week. The Senate Finance Committee is considering a similar proposal.
"In a state like ours, we have so many of the jobs going overseas or just going away. It takes time for people to go through retraining to look for another job," said U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, who sits on the Finance Committee and is pushing the extension as part of a second economic stimulus package.
In the first three months of this year, 41,000 people in Michigan exhausted their unemployment benefits, she said.
Stabenow said the economic stimulus package might be attached to the next Iraq supplemental appropriations bill.
"We are now spending $12 billion a month in Iraq, including rebuilding their roads and schools while ours are crumbling," Stabenow said. "We are going to bring forward an economic stimulus for America."
The extension was most recently proposed in the economic stimulus package that President Bush signed in February. But the extension was dropped because of the president's objections.
The White House didn't respond to an inquiry about whether the president continues to oppose the extension proposal. But supporters contend that the worsening economy gives the proposal a better chance this time.
Republican supporter Rep. Thaddeus McCotter of Livonia says he hopes a single-issue bill comes up, rather than folding a benefits extension into a larger, stimulus bill.
"Our people in Michigan are hard hit," McCotter said. "Let's just do the one good idea rather than do a bigger package that could have bad ideas that are counter-productive."
Under the proposal, unemployed workers who exhausted their currently available 26 weeks of benefits within the past 18 months could apply for extended benefits, Levin's office said.
The proposal would cost about $12.7 billion and be paid from the federal unemployment trust funds, which currently have a surplus.
James Sherk, a labor expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., says it'd be a mistake to extend unemployment benefits.
"It takes some of the pressure off of workers," Sherk said. "If you've got the unemployment benefits coming in, then you are not going to work quite as hard to find a job because you've got that cushion... You can decide to stay home and watch the game tonight instead of working on the resume and making more phone calls."
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