President Joe Biden on Monday directly addressed a rising critique of the enhanced unemployment benefits included in his $1.9 trillion COVID-19 spending plan as he announced a host of new economic recovery actions, including new guidance to help states disburse pandemic child care aid.
Both items were included in the president’s recently unveiled plan for helping workers re-enter the workforce and come after a disappointing report from the Department of Labor last week.
Biden, delivering remarks from the White House, called the child care investment the largest of its kind “since World War II” and a “real answer to a real problem that our economy is facing right now.”
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“With these funds, states can help hundreds of thousands of providers reopen and stay open and provide safe and healthy learning environments for more than 5 million children,” the president said. “These funds will also allow states to provide over 800,000 families with subsidies to pay for child care. Simply put, this can help working parents get back to work.”
Biden also directly addressed a critique that the rest of the White House has danced around in recent days.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a number of Republican governors responded to the most recent jobs report by calling for an end to Biden’s expanded pandemic unemployment benefits. Opponents to the initiative claim that some of the unemployed workers could receive more in unemployment benefits than they would make working at their old jobs and would therefore choose not to look for new work.
“Just last week, Secretary Yellen and President Biden disputed the fact that enhanced unemployment benefits are disincentivizing people from reentering the workforce. Now the White House is doubling down on their failed policies, revealing that their real focus is getting more Americans dependent on government rather than back to work,” said America Rising spokesman Joseph Gierut.
During his Monday remarks, however, Biden explicitly stated that when anyone receiving pandemic unemployment benefits is offered a job, “you can’t refuse that job and just keep getting the unemployment benefits.”
“No one should be allowed to game the system,” he continued. “The law is clear.”
Pressed by the Washington Examiner on how the government plans to enforce Biden’s proposal, a senior White House official claimed that the Department of Labor will begin clarifying that “under all [unemployment insurance] programs including the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program put in place last year, workers may not turn down a job due to a general, non-specific concern about COVID-19 and continue to receive benefits.”
“Under the PUA program, a worker may receive benefits if the worker certifies weekly that one of the few specific COVID-related reasons specified by Congress is the cause of their unemployment,” the official continued. “The President is directing the Department of Labor to take concrete steps to raise awareness about these and other requirements.”
Nebraska Republican Sen. Ben Sasse said in a Monday statement, however, that “President Biden is all over the place on unemployment insurance — he wants to go after folks who are gaming the system, but he’s denying the reality that his policies are making the situation worse so he’s trying to make struggling businesses the boogeymen.”
“President Biden and his party were warned this would happen but they doubled down on bad policy. Instead of making unemployment pay more than work, we ought to convert the emergency unemployment payments into signing bonuses,” Sasse wrote. “Cut the spin, convert unemployment into a signing bonus, and get America and Americans up and running.”
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The president further framed the benefits as a “lifeline” for the millions of people in the country who lost work in 2020 over the past year “through no fault of their own.”
“It’s easy to say, the line has been, because of the generous unemployment benefits that it’s a major factor in labor shortages. Americans want to work,” Biden claimed. “I think the people who claim Americans won’t work, even if they find a good and fair opportunity, underestimate the American people.”
The president also briefly detailed a new $350 billion program, also outlined in the American Rescue Plan, to help states distribute aid to teachers, medical professionals, other essential workers, and hospitality industry staff.
You can watch Biden’s remarks in full below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAgzQReUz2E
