The Coming Battle Over That Extra $600 In Unemployment Benefits
When lawmakers added $600 per week to unemployment benefits in March, it was a lifeline to the millions of workers who had been laid off — and would be laid off — due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, with the extra money set to expire in July and the pandemic far from over, there are real questions whether Congress will extend those federal dollars — and how hard Democrats are willing to fight Republicans who are seemingly dead-set against it.
“You cannot operate an economy when you’re going to pay people more to not work than to work,” Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) told HuffPost, echoing the complaint of Senate Republicans who voted unsuccessfully to cut the extra $600 from the March relief bill.
Grothman added that, when the House voted on the bill, many Republicans may have been unaware that the extra $600 would mean some workers receive more in unemployment than they earned at their jobs. He predicted Republicans would push back forcefully against an extension of those benefits.
Senate Republican leaders and the Trump administration agreed with Democrats on the $600 as part of a roughly $2 trillion package of coronavirus relief measures in March. Democrats pushed for full wage replacement for anyone who lost their job. The administration argued it would be too tricky for states to calculate exact wage replacements, so it settled on adding $600 in federal money every week to the unemployment checks paid by states. The sum is roughly the difference between the average wage and the average weekly unemployment payment.
With an extra $600 on top of the unemployment benefits that states already pay, millions of workers have been able to ride out the pandemic at home ― which is what public health experts have recommended to slow the spread of the virus.
While the expanded benefits have helped individual families, Democrats view them as a key public health measure as well, according to a spokesperson for the House Ways and Means Committee....
