Senate Republicans offering up ways to pay for federal jobless benefits

Republican Sen. Dan Coats (Ind.) said Wednesday that there is plenty of low-hanging fruit for Congress to pick that would cover the cost of a renewal of a federal unemployment benefits program. 

Senate Republicans are rolling out numerous ways to offset the $6.4 billion price tag of the three-month bipartisan measure that would reauthorize the program for those who have been out of work at least six months and have exhausted their state benefits. 

{mosads}Coats suggested the lawmakers could extract $27 billion by stopping combined payments of Social Security disability and unemployment benefits to some workers, he said Wednesday on MSNBC. 

He said the disability program requires workers to prove they can’t work while, at the same time, workers have to show they are looking for a job and are capable of working to receive jobless benefits. 

“If we had not passed this motion to proceed to debate it, talk about, offer amendments, we wouldn’t have had the opportunity to provide those alternatives,” he said. 

He argued Reid had hoped that the procedural cloture motion would fail, so he could blame Republicans for being “heartless and cruel.” 

So, Coats said he decided to team up with five other Republicans in an effort to get their offset ideas into the mix with the aim of paying for the program. 

“What the six of us wanted to do was get to the point where we could go down to the floor, offer our alternatives and put it before the American people,” he said. 

The alternatives include ways to pay for the bill but also propose policy changes to the program that go beyond “just sending checks” and would help get people back to work.

Coats said he has offered a “basket of options” to the Senate that would “raise more than enough money to pay for this program if it goes forward.”

“I don’t want to keep sending checks saying we’re not going to fix it. I want to get the economy moving again,” he said.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has offered a similar idea. 

Coats said he and other Republicans are responding to President Obama’s call for the GOP to bring their ideas forward for ways to offset the cost of the program. 

Congressional Democrats say they are open to the idea of paying for the measure even if, historically, they haven’t done so in the past.

Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, said Wednesday that, even with the labor market’s improvement, Congress needs to continue the federal program but should find a way to pay for it. 

“I think, at this point, lawmakers should work really hard to pay for it over a period of time and get back on track on ensuring whatever changes are made to policy are paid for,” he said.

He said Congress should pay for the bill because he doesn’t consider the issue to be an emergency any longer, but unemployment remains historically high at 7 percent. 

Zandi suggests lawmakers should allow the program to fade away, as it was designed to do, as the unemployment rates drop in the states. 

He estimates that most states, except maybe those like Nevada and Rhode Island that are stuck at much higher rates of unemployment than the national average, would fall out of the program by the end of this year as their jobless rates decline.

Still, while he says the $6.4 billion for three months should be paid for, that demand should not be a precondition to continuing to provide the benefits.