On the recordNovember 18, 2010
Madam Speaker, the Joint Economic Committee, which I chair, released a report today that finds that if Congress fails to extend the Federal unemployment insurance benefits program, the unintended consequences could be extremely serious. Serious not just for the 2 million Americans who would see their benefits expire in December, but extremely serious for the larger economy as well. Prematurely ending the program would drain our economy of some $80 billion in purchasing power, just as our fragile economy is beginning to recover. This would result in the loss of over 1 million jobs over the next year. Even now, there are five Americans looking for work for every job opening in the land; and more than 40 percent of those unemployed have been out of work for 27 weeks or more, including over 159,000 in New York State, with some 95,000 in my home of New York City. Choosing to vote against an extension, and thus add a million Americans to the ranks of the unemployed, cannot possibly be considered as a wise economic policy choice.
