Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I wish to speak briefly about the issue of unemployment insurance benefits. We, the Congress, allowed these benefits to expire 21 days ago. I believe there is a major misperception on the part of some about what the effect of this is. This proposal to extend these benefits is talked about as a so-called extension of unemployment insurance. That suggests that the provision simply provides additional weeks of unemployment compensation payments to people who have used up all their benefits. Understandably, there are people in my State and around the country who say: Wait a minute. At some point you don't want to keep adding more and more weeks of unemployment benefits. What we need to understand is that is not what we are proposing to do here. What we have been trying to do is not to add more weeks but merely to allow the unemployed to continue drawing the same number of weeks of benefits that they were able to draw prior to the expiration of the program we are trying to extend. The provision does not provide additional payments to anyone who has exhausted his or her Federal and State benefits before the authorization of this program expired on June 2. It does not extend the number of weeks of benefits under the programs. Rather, it simply allows the programs to continue operating for people who use up the weeks of State-provided unemployment benefits that are available to them.…”