In 11 days, enhanced federal unemployment will start to expire for the more than 30 million Americans who've been shut out of their jobs because of a global pandemic. If those extra benefits are gone, real pain will start. "We'd basically have to choose between paying bills and eating," Erin Walker told The Washington Post. Walker was furloughed from her job as a dining manager at a college campus near Summerville, S.C., at the end of April. "I honestly don't know what I would do."
The White House is now leaning toward approving an extension of those enhanced benefits, but not at the current $600/week level. They argue that it is too nice for the plebes, and makes people not want to work. You might have thought it was the idea of entering a workplace full of potentially sick people and becoming part of the body count that was keeping people away from their jobs. But you would be a person with normal human feelings, not a Republican. Thus Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin says the administration is going to make sure that those benefits are extended, but reduced to "no more" than 100% of the worker's prior wages. Which, the Post reports, "surprised some congressional Republicans who thought he shared their strong opposition to extending the benefits."
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For his part, Sen. Mitch McConnell has indicated that some form of the enhanced benefits would likely be in the next bill, but he's called the $600 boost a "mistake," so he's going to fight the generous benefits. But he seems to be in no hurry. The Senate doesn't come back in until July 20, which is five days before the enhanced benefits expire. "They don't have time, which is what is very scary about all this," Bill Hoagland, senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center and former Republican staff director for the Senate Budget Committee told the Post. "It's very irresponsible."
It's also McConnell's modus operandi: Wait until the very last minute when the stakes are unbelievably high to force Democrats into submission. Never mind the harm done. Like to Tyler Kemp, a 38-year-old in Las Vegas who is unemployed because of the coronavirus, but for the very first time has felt like life isn't quite as treacherous for him and his mother, with whom he lives, because he's had a bit of a cushion. "If that stuff expires, it means that I won't have any money for emergency things," he said. "It's like a security blanket that hasn't been there for so long."
Erin Walker, the furloughed dining manager, says that she and her partner, who lost his job as well, can't possibly meet their $2,400 rent, car payment, utility, and cell phone bills on the $260 a week they would each make, after taxes, on South Carolina's unemployment benefits. “That’s not including groceries,” she said. “There’s absolutely no way to make that math work. […] It's very, very scary to think about," she said. "It's not that we don’t want to go back to work—it's that we're not able."