Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. I would like to thank Leader Schumer and the ranking member of the Finance Committee, Senator Wyden, for bringing this commonsense proposal to the floor.

I have long advocated for the idea that we should tie benefits to the conditions of the economy rather than simply politically convenient dates or inconvenient dates that don't matter, don't make any sense to working people in our country, and create idiotic fights here that don't help the people we all have been sent here, in theory at least, to serve.

Right now, we are facing an unprecedented set of conditions in our country. We are being racked by an economic downturn. It is different from any that we have ever seen before and at the same time, we are facing this incredible health crisis. One in six workers in this country is unemployed. One in six workers is unemployed today.

But for once, thankfully, we were able to come together in a bipartisan way in March and pass the CARES Act, which is benefitting these workers in two ways.

First, we expanded unemployment benefits to cover almost 10 million self-employed workers, gig workers, and others who are usually left behind in circumstances like this. That is something we should have changed a long time ago, but we finally got it done, and we did it in a bipartisan way.

Second, as Leader Schumer and Senator Wyden said, we added $600 per week to normal unemployment benefits for all 30 million workers claiming benefits. That $600 weekly benefit has prevented a level of severe hardship that is almost impossible to describe. It has paid rent and prevented evictions. It has kept food on the table so families don't go hungry. It has kept the lights on and paid for the internet so our kids can learn. The bottom line is that the $600 weekly payment has been an essential lifeline to families in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

In Colorado alone, over 450,000 workers are receiving the expanded benefit, and it has put a total of nearly $2.5 billion into our economy. Nationwide, the numbers are staggering. One analysis showed that these additional payments help keep 12 million Americans out of poverty and keep poverty rates from rising. Without these payments, wages across the entire economy would have declined by 10 percent from February to May. We completely offset that decline.

You know what that means is that working people actually were able to continue to buy things in this economy. The leader might be interested to know that I was talking to an economist recently, Raj Chetty, from Harvard, who has done a study, including other places, of New York. That study shows that the biggest loss in terms of consumer spending has come from the wealthiest areas in New York. That resulted in the biggest unemployment.

In other words, if you have a small business in a wealthy area in New York, your small business is cratering because wealthy people aren't spending money on services because they are scared of getting COVID.

In other parts of New York, there has been much less destabilization, and that is because of these unemployment benefits--directly because of these unemployment benefits--because where the unemployment rate has gone up, people's incomes have been able to be stable.

I am the first to say that not everything we have done with the CARES Act has been perfect. As we know, the CARES Act left out too many families, and too many States have been too slow to get these benefits out. That is the result of delivering benefits through 50 different systems that have been underfunded and undermined for 50 years. But once they have gotten out, these benefits have made a transformational difference. Everyone in the Senate should be proud of that.

I come out here all the time and complain how terrible this place is. I was amazed to hear the majority leader this morning talk about the ``incompetence'' of local officials. There is no body in the world more incompetent than this Senate. But here is a moment when we can actually be proud of something that we did here. Even President Trump has been running campaign ads touting these benefits. Even as he is running these ads--which, as Senator Wyden said, he is running because this unemployment benefit is popular--he is threatening the take away the benefit by allowing the $600 to sunset at the end of July. That would be a profound mistake.

Right now, even with these enhanced benefits in place, 17 percent of American families can't cover 3 months of basic expenses. Without the extra benefits, that number wouldn't be 17 percent. It would be 43 percent, almost half of the families in our country. Today, nearly 10 percent of Americans can't make the rent. Without the extra benefits, that number would double or triple.

If we let these benefits expire, we are going to throw tens of millions of Americans who rely on them into a profound financial crisis. We will be cutting their monthly income by $2,400. If we go over that cliff and completely cut off benefits, not only will it cut incomes by 50 percent or 60 percent or 70 percent for literally millions of Americans who can't go back to work, but it will cause extreme damage to the economy.

Nothing has kept our economy afloat more than this investment in unemployment. Allowing these benefits to expire would remove $50 billion a month from the economy, reducing the GDP by 2.5 percent in the second half of this year. That would lead to 2 million jobs lost and a significant increase in the unemployment rate. So we would be right back here again. We shouldn't be doing that, at this point, with this very fragile economy and when COVID-19 is spreading in far too many places.

Some of the industries are facing extreme crises in my State as well as across the country. Hotels are projected to suffer revenue losses of almost 60 percent in 2020. Between March and May 2020, total restaurant sales were down more than $94 billion from expected levels, and 90 percent of independent concert venues are at risk of permanently closing down in a few months without receiving additional relief. We can't tell people who are working in all of these industries--when there is no way these businesses will even be close to being 100 percent in the near future--that they are just on their own.

That is why we need to pass an expanded unemployment benefit that continues after July. We should tie that expanded benefit to the unemployment rate, as Senator Schumer and Senator Wyden have designed, so that it steps the benefit down as the economy heals. That makes sense. Nobody here wants to be in a place at which the unemployment benefit disincentivizes people from working, which is why they step it down, but it needs to stay in place until this economy heals.

It is the wrong approach for the country and for the working people in this country to send them over the cliff right now, and it will be the wrong approach to send them over the cliff in 6 months or even in 2 years if the unemployment rate is still elevated. We need to extend expanded unemployment benefits, and we need to do it until the economy recovers. It is the right thing for the workers and families who are wondering how they are going to get through one of the most difficult challenges of their lives. It is the right thing to do for the broader economy in order for it to come back as strongly as it can as we work toward a vaccine.

I thank my colleagues again for their tremendous leadership. I hope that we will be able to work on this in a bipartisan way, as we did before, and that we will be able to pass these extensions for the American people.

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