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Extending federal unemployment insurance is vital for millions of Americans laid off through no fault of their own, and it serves as an important economic stimulus.

Let me just try to give you sort of the intuitive one here on the stimulus funds. If you have a two-person economy - let's imagine we have two farms, and that's the whole world, just two farms. If one of those farmers gets unemployment benefits, who do you think pays for him? Am I going way over your heads today?

Not only do unemployment benefits help families who are hurting; they also put money into their pockets that they'll then spend - and their spending will keep other Americans in jobs.

Understand, this is unemployment insurance. It's not welfare, as a lot of my Republican colleagues like to suggest it is. You pay into it when you're working. You get help when you're not.

Every dollar of SNAP benefits generates $1.84 in the economy in terms of economic activity. If people are able to buy a little more in the grocery store, someone has to stock it, package it, shelve it, process it, ship it. All of those are jobs. It's the most direct stimulus you can get in the economy during these tough times.

They keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job, because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does.

Any that is why I think any kind of a stimulus package is going to have to help people who are without work, without a job, help them have health insurance.

The way Obama voters and non-Obama voters deal with unemployment are a very different.

Well, the infrastructure part of the stimulus has worked. There's absolutely no question about it. We can demonstrate in Pennsylvania and other states around the union how it's produced good, paying jobs both on the construction sites and back in American factories. It has worked.

Unemployment is sky-rocketing; deflation is in our future for the first time since the Great Depression. I don't care whose fault it is, it's the truth.