(Photo : Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
President Biden Meets Virtually With Governors Affected By Hurricane
WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 30: U.S. President Joe Biden meets virtually with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell and governors and mayors from states and cities impacted by Hurricane Ida in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on August 30, 2021 in Washington, DC. The Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday causing flooding and a widespread power outage. Ida continues to move northeast as a tropical storm, dumping rain across Mississippi and other southern states. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
President Joe Biden believes the US economy is strong enough to resist evictions and the fall in unemployment benefits. Officials argue that other safety net programs, such as the Child Tax Credit and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which Biden permanently increased earlier this summer, are sufficient to smooth things out. A White House spokesperson said on Friday that there are no plans to reconsider the expiration of unemployment benefits.
Marty Walsh, the country's labor secretary, said the country's workforce was ready for the change. According to Walsh and others, job figures are looking up, with the unemployment rate down to a respectable 5.2 percent as of Friday. However, Andrew Stettler, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a left-leaning think group, believes that the termination of enhanced unemployment benefits is still too soon.
Stettler believes the government should have connected the expiration of the protections to particular economic recovery indicators rather than setting an arbitrary timetable. He proposes a three-month period with countrywide unemployment below 5% as a fair baseline for terminating unemployment benefits, ABC30 reported.
Demands to extend unemployment benefits rise as job growth slows
As the COVID-19 Delta variant continues to rise and job growth slows, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are under pressure to prolong federal pandemic-related unemployment benefits, which are scheduled to expire this weekend for millions of American workers.
Three federal unemployment assistance programs, which were initially implemented by former President Donald Trump's administration last March, will expire on Monday, with an estimated 7.5 million unemployed people losing all of their benefits. According to projections from the Century Foundation, an additional 3 million people will no longer receive a $300 weekly increase to their state-provided unemployment benefits.
Per Newsweek via MSN, individuals who are set to lose benefits have shared their stories on social media in an apparent attempt to persuade lawmakers to support an extension, while supporters of an extension have chastised Biden and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin-a moderate Democrat who has indicated he will vote against an extension in a Democrat-only budget bill-for the aid's abrupt termination.
The Biden administration and Congress believed that an aggressive vaccination rollout would help the economy rebound by September when they renewed the unemployment programs in March. However, the unexpected spread of the extremely infectious Delta variant, which currently accounts for 94 percent of all coronavirus infections in the United States, has hampered that strategy.
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Congress stands firm on refusing to extend unemployment benefits
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released statistics showing only 235,000 jobs were created in August, down from 1.1 million in July and much below economists' expectations of 733,000 jobs.
As part of the $2.2 trillion Cares Act, Congress enacted temporarily increased unemployment insurance in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of the Americans Rescue Plan stimulus package, Congress extended these unemployment benefits in March 2021 until tomorrow.
Congress, on the other hand, has decided not to extend these unemployment benefits any further. Unemployment benefits are ending at the same time that another COVID-19 pandemic assistance is running out. The US Supreme Court, for example, overturned the federal eviction ban enforced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), citing a lack of congressional authorization.
The termination of the eviction moratorium and unemployment benefits might affect other federal spending, such as student debt forgiveness on a large scale. These unemployment insurance programs were always meant to be transitory, and they were linked to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Due to a comeback of COVID-19, Congress will likely allow new unemployment benefits in the future. There are no imminent plans, however, to prolong the assistance beyond tomorrow. However, Congress granted $350 billion to the states under the American Rescue Plan to offer financial assistance to those who are unemployed, as per Forbes.
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