On the recordDecember 7, 2011
It is our pledge, because there's just too much at stake here. This Congress has been incredibly unproductive. You might think it had been unemployed for much of the past year. And we need to stay and complete the work. This is work that was done practically on Christmas Eve last year, when this extension was in jeopardy again. And we ought not to go right down to the wire like that again. There's no reason that this could not be done in the coming week, but for this ideological commitment saying that unemployment insurance coverage is not good for the economy. The facts don't bear that out. The individual stories that you're telling us about tonight, those are the individuals, those are the families that have so much at stake. And of course, because of this economic effect, those unemployed families, when they get a dollar of unemployment insurance, they have to spend that dollar. They may be spending it at the grocery store. They may be paying a landlord or a mortgage company. They may be paying on their credit card or their car, just to have the basic necessities of life; and that's why the economic impact on small businesses is so significant from doing what we would need to do in order to support these families engaged in an active job search or getting the retraining and the retooling they need to have an opportunity for a job in the future.
