As the White House and Congress negotiate a new coronavirus relief measure, a key point is what to do with federal bills of $600 a week to tens of millions of unemployed people.
The supplemental payments, approved earlier this year, expired last week. House Democrats want to extend them through January, which might be too much for too long. And congressional Republicans? Well, they’ve found a way to combine the GOP’s reputation for callousness with the Democrats’ proclivity for convoluted Washington-knows-best solutions.
Under the GOP proposal, the supplemental federal payments would be cut to $200 per week initially. This reduction would come despite the fact that COVID-19 is running wild in places, and the economy is weakening. After two months, the $200 per week would shift to a figure that would vary from person to person and would be based on what it would take to replace 70% of a worker’s lost income. That would require state employment offices to calculate the exact income of each person who applies for relief.
State employment offices are already overwhelmed and are struggling to keep up. When the shutdowns first went into effect, virtually every state was hit with a wall of applicants and some, like Florida, reported horror stories of people waiting months for their checks.
Things have moved on, but they’re far from perfect. Just this week, Washington state announced that it had triumphed over its initial order book, but that it has been several weeks with the many programs won since mid-June.
The pandemic highlighted the need for states to modernize their PC systems and rent more people to process unemployment applications. Despite this, the last thing flooded state agencies want in the midst of a crisis is a mandate to create new databases and calculate the candidate’s source of income and benefits.
Calculations would be especially difficult for self-employed and personal call-on-demand, who obtain a source of income from sources, many of which would possibly lack documentation. Because of the peculiarities of how states should perform calculations, staff in some states would get less than their peers in similar situations in other states.
Republicans say $600 a week is simply too much and discourages some people from returning to work. There is truth to that. When $600 is added to state unemployment checks, many Americans are collecting more to stay home than they would if they returned to work, which could indicate that they were not being paid living wages to begin with.
Democrats have a point saying that the coronavirus pandemic is still terrorizing the United States — thanks in no small measure to the Trump administration’s incompetent response — and so pushing people back to work might not be such an ethical idea.
One solution may be only weekly bills that start at $600 but are slightly minimized over time with the presumption that the economy will improve. Alternatively, invoices can start at the full amount and still be indexed to the unemployment rate.
Instead, Republicans proposed a perpetual movement machine. They give the states two months to update their systems and how to perform the calculations. At the most likely time the states are not sown, they may still be two months old. At that point, the additional benefits would be about to expire.
This approach is way too complicated. When you are relying on rickety state unemployment insurance systems to distribute jobless benefits in the midst of a pandemic, the best approach is KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
If you don’t see this reader survey, refresh your page.
DIRECT LINE: Share your story about the coronavirus. We can comment on your feedback.