Speaker Pelosi says unemployment benefits are economic stimulus. Those are bare-bones benefits.
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?
Because tax cuts create an incentive to increase output, employment, and production, they also help balance the budget by reducing means-tested government expenditures. A faster-growing economy means lower unemployment and higher incomes, resulting in reduced unemployment benefits and other social welfare programs.
You have to be looking for a job to get unemployment benefits. If you stop looking for work, you are no longer eligible to receive benefits.
In a very weak economy, when you say 'cut government spending,' what you mean is you're laying off school teachers and you're de-funding various programs that put money into the economy. This means you have more unemployed people that then draw unemployment benefits and don't pay taxes.
I have a lot of hard-working, blue-collar people in my district who are at the end of their unemployment benefits.
In 2012, I helped lead the successful effort in Congress to allow states to conduct drug testing of people receiving unemployment benefits.
More broadly, we are going to have to examine the safety net programs to make sure they are poised to catch the families before they fall even more, especially in the areas of unemployment benefits, child care assistance, and foster care.
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.
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.
