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.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
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.
Programs like food stamps, unemployment insurance, Medicaid, and job retraining help Americans get back on their feet when they are down and out and laid off through no fault of their own.
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.
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.
While some people are certainly seeing economic benefits, many others are unemployed, underemployed, without health insurance and struggling to make ends meet.
Everybody wants to help folks out. But we've got a system where you can stay on unemployment for an awfully long time. And I think we need to create a system of decreasing benefits over time to encourage you to get a job.
Speaker Pelosi says unemployment benefits are economic stimulus. Those are bare-bones benefits.
You can make more money on unemployment than you can going down and getting one of those jobs that is an honest job, but it doesn't pay as much. And so, that's what's happened to us is that we have put in so much entitlement into our government, that we really have spoiled our citizenry and said you don't want the jobs that are available.
I've heard the argument that unemployment benefits somehow act as a disincentive to the long-term unemployed when it comes to looking for work, but the opposite is true. Unemployment Insurance serves as a powerful incentive for people to keep searching for jobs, rather than drop out of the labor force altogether.
More people on unemployment benefits is not success in America, fewer people on not because we kicked them off but because they have been able to get a job in the private sector, because government got out of the way.