Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. In Wyoming we have a generous unemployment insurance program to help people who are out of work, and the CARES Act adds to that, essentially, a bonus payment of $600 additional per week. For a 40-hour workweek, that comes down to an average of about a $15-an-hour bonus for not being able to go back to work, and that is on top of their regular unemployment benefits.

Well, since the CARES Act has passed, what we have seen is that this additional $600 per week means that most recipients are paid more for not working than they would make if they actually were on the job working. This fact has been confirmed by news reports, by academic researchers, and by the Congressional Budget Office.

Even former Obama administration Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, along with President Obama's Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, agrees that $600 per week on top of unemployment insurance through the States is too much.

We have ``help wanted'' signs all around my State. I talked to the people at unemployment insurance, who run the program. They tell me that they are having many people who are getting paid much more than if they would work, if they would take the jobs where you have employers out there hoping, looking for employees to come and work.

You can't continue to pay people more to not work than to work. Yet instead of trying to address this identifiable and correctible problem, today my colleagues are asking that we vote to extend the $600-per-week bonus payments and continue these untargeted payments for many months into the future.

As a matter of fact, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, living on Fantasy Island, wants to extend these for 6 more months, all the way until the end of January. The CBO and other researchers and economists have looked at this and said this would be a heavy wet blanket on the economy. It would prevent 10 million people from going back to work-- going all the way until the end of January.

It is likely that such a proposal would cost $1 trillion--$1 trillion--and much of that is we are talking about paying people to not work instead of helping people work.

So I hope my colleagues will join me in better targeting help to the unemployed in a way that doesn't pay people more when they are sitting at home not working than they would make at work.

We are working on a plan now to provide additional help for the unemployed if they can't go back to work because their job isn't there, isn't available; if, for health purposes, they can't go back to work; but do it in a way that the Democrats have claimed that they want to do but haven't even proposed. We need to make it much more closely aligned with lost wages.

So we are going to be introducing this plan shortly, and I hope my colleagues on the other side of the aisle will engage with us in that effort.

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