Paul says he’ll back unemployment benefits extension if costs are offset

Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, said he would support an extension to long-term unemployment benefits if it is offset in other parts of the budget and contains provisions to jump start economic growth.

“I think what is really cruel is to have an economy that doesn’t have jobs in it, so we have to talk about what policy creates jobs,” Mr. Paul said on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” “What I have been saying all along, we have to figure out how to create jobs and keep people from becoming long-term unemployed.”

The Senate is expected the hold a procedural voteApple“> MondayApple“> on a three-month extension to long-term unemployment benefits, which expired for 1.3 million Americans on Dec. 28. The unpaid for short-term extension would add about $6.5 billion to the deficit.

Mr. Paul’s solution to reduce long-term unemployment: lower taxes in struggling areas to encourage residents to put money back into the community.

“What I’ve been promoting are economic freedom zones, which any area that has unemployment 1 1/2 times the national average, we would dramatically lower taxes to try to spur and stimulate the economy there and create jobs,” he said.


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I think they should bump the recipients that have been on the dole the longest.

Top White House economic adviser Gene Sperling took to the Sunday morning talk shows to push for Congress to extend emergency unemployment benefits ahead of a key Senate vote Monday.

Sperling, the director of President Obama's National Economic Council, noted that "tomorrow is the day that 1.3 million Americans go to their mailbox and find that the check that they'd been relying on to put food on their table, put gas in their cars to look for a new job, will not be there" in an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."
It's Bush's Fault!


On that program and on CNN's "State of the Union," Sperling pushed for Congress to extend the Emergency Unemployment Compensation for three months. The program expired in December, immediately ending benefits for 1.3 million of the 4.1 million Americans who have been out of work for 27 weeks or longer and removing those benefits for thousands of workers who exhaust the normal 26 weeks of benefits in the weeks ahead.

"What we're finding is that the worst legacy of the Great Recession is that there's a crisis in long-term unemployment," Sperling told Candy Crowley on CNN. Sperling suggested that President Obama would advocate a "Grand Bargain" on job creation comprising infrastructure spending, corporate tax reform, immigration reform, and housing finance reform. But in the short term, re-upping the unemployment benefits is a priority for the White House, even if they are not paid for with offsets elsewhere in the budget.

"Fourteen of the last 17 times that emergency unemployment's been extended, there have been no strings attached," Sperling explained on "Meet the Press." "All five times that President Bush extended unemployment benefits, there were no pay-fors."


http://washingtonexaminer.com/obama-adviser-gene-sperling-pushes-for-unemployment-benefits-extension-without-offsets/article/2541592