California mulls continuing $600 boost for unemployed if Congress cuts funds
California state lawmakers are considering a plan to continue a $600 weekly unemployment benefit for state residents if Congress does not extend the emergency funding this month.
“We have millions of Californians that are on a financial cliff,” said Phil Ting, a Democratic state lawmaker from San Francisco. “They really need that money to pay rent, to buy food, to pay for everyday living expenses.”
Cuts in federal emergency assistance would probably put more California residents in danger of losing housing, and could make California’s homelessness crisis even worse, Ting said.
“The number one way you prevent the spread of Covid is you keep people in their homes,” he said.
As coronavirus cases rise, and the number of confirmed deaths nationwide reaches 150,000, Congress is debating whether to extend a $600 weekly payment to supplement state unemployment benefits. In California, those benefits average a little more than $300 a week. The extra federal dollars, experts say, are providing critical assistance to millions of Americans who have lost their jobs.
But the additional payment, approved as a temporary emergency measure in March, expires this month.
Congressional Republicans have proposed reducing the additional federal benefit to a $200 a week, arguing that providing Americans with more emergency support is discouraging them from returning to work. Democratic congressional leaders called the Republican plan “totally inadequate”, as well as “hard-hearted” and “cruel”. House Democrats passed a bill that would extend the full $600 payments through January.
“We’re nowhere close to a deal,” Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, said after a meeting with Democrats on Wednesday, meaning that the additional federal unemployment insurance program will expire on Friday, Politico reported. Because of how the original legislation was written, the additional emergency payments actually ended a week earlier.
Related: 'I'm squeaking by right now': voices of America's unemployment crisis
Democratic state lawmakers in California announced on Tuesday that they are discussing how to step in to continue the full $600 payments for California residents if Congress does not approve them, as part of state Democrats’ broader proposed $100bn economic stimulus plan.
California must “do everything possible to keep people home and housed and keep them on their own feet”, Ting, the San Francisco state lawmaker, said. “If we don’t do that, people may end up on the street and then be homeless, and they’ll be using other state programs.”
California is “the fifth-largest economy in the world, and this is the time we need to be leveraging all of our financial resources to get people through this pandemic”, Ting said.
The discussions are still preliminary, and the action California lawmakers might take depends on what Congress approves, he said. If the federal government provides $200 a week, for instance, California lawmakers might choose to fund an additional $400 a week to make up the gap.
The additional California pandemic unemployment payments would probably be paid for with a combination of loans from the federal government, and a tax voucher program, which is essentially “asking for a loan from taxpayers”, Ting said.
California is currently one of the national hotspots for coronavirus infections, with total cases nearing 500,000. It passed New York for the highest state total of confirmed coronavirus cases earlier in July, though it has seen many fewer deaths, with only 8,518 as of 27 July.
