[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 148 (2002), Part 14]
[Senate]
[Page 19027]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




            EXTENSION OF UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION BENEFITS

  Mr. REID. Madam President, there is pending legislation we certainly 
would like to move. We have tried very hard to get some help in this 
regard. This legislation gives the same number of weeks of benefits for 
unemployment compensation as was given under President Bush, Sr., in 
the early 1990s. Only Oregon and Washington, the States with the 
highest unemployment in the Nation, will get a little bit more, and 
that is because of an extension of Congress passed in March. The March 
bill provided up to 65 weeks of benefits for those two States. Our bill 
only provides up to 7 more.
  This is extremely important. We have people out of work. That might 
not sound like much to somebody who has a job, but to someone who does 
not have a job, it is everything. We have 2 million more Americans 
unemployed than we had 18 months ago. We have economic problems that 
have been kind of covered up. We have a situation where there is $4.5 
trillion lost in the stock market. If someone was going to retire with 
their 401(k) or their IRA, they would have to work up to 5 years more, 
having lost 30 to 35 percent of the value of their retirement.
  I have people I welcome to Washington every Thursday. They came to me 
today saying they do not know what they will do because they lost so 
much of the value of what they will retire on. They do not know what 
they will do.
  We need to extend unemployment compensation. We did it before under 
President Bush senior. There was an emergency then. We did it on more 
than one occasion. We only want to do it now on one occasion.
  As I indicated, the bill will provide an additional 20 weeks of 
extended benefits for high unemployment States and an additional 13 
weeks to all other States for workers who run out or about to run out 
of benefits.

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