Listen Live
The Light 103.9 Featured Video
CLOSE

President Obama said Wednesday that Congress should reauthorize extended unemployment insurance for the long-term jobless.

“I think it makes sense for us to extend unemployment insurance because there’s still a lot of folks out there hurting,” Obama said during a press conference following a Democratic wipeout in the midterm elections on Tuesday.

Federally-funded extended benefits, which in some states give the unemployed 73 weeks of aid on top of the 26 weeks traditionally provided by state governments, will expire at the end of November if Congress takes no action. That means the House and Senate will have less than two weeks from when they reconvene on Nov. 15 to reach an agreement that took nearly two months this summer.

Obama said extending the benefits would be among the things “that we can do right now that will help sustain the recovery and advance it, even as we’re sitting down and figuring out, okay, over the next several years, what kind of a budget cut can we make that are intelligent, smart, and won’t be undermining our recovery and won’t be encouraging job growth.”

Congressional Republicans stood in near-unanimous opposition to reauthorizing the jobless aid this summer, citing the deficit impact of the benefits. Congress routinely provides the long-term unemployed with extra weeks of unemployment insurance during times of recession and usually the deficit impact of the spending is not offset with spending cuts as Republicans have demanded this year.

Read entire article at HuffingtonPost.com

Share this post on Facebook! CLICK HERE:

http://widgets.fbshare.me/files/fbshare.js