Support Clean Extension of Payroll Tax Cut and Unemployment Insurance

Recipient: U.S. House of Representatives

Dear Representative,

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, we urge you to support a clean one-year extension of the federal emergency unemployment insurance (UI) program and a clean extension of the payroll tax cut enacted last year. These provisions will alleviate hardship for the most vulnerable while fostering economic growth for all. Congress should reject any proposal that reduces the number of weeks of UI benefits or imposes new burdensome restrictions on who may obtain relief.

We urge you to immediately extend the federal emergency unemployment insurance program through December 31, 2012. The current extension of this program expires at the end of this year, putting millions of vulnerable workers and families at risk. An extension of these provisions will not provide additional weeks for those individuals who have exhausted their maximum number of 99 weeks of benefits.

Extending unemployment benefits will help the economy recover while providing badly needed assistance in today’s historic economic crisis. As documented by the Congressional Budget Office, the extension of UI also provides the most significant boost to the economy and job growth of any policy option being debated by Congress. The Economic Policy Institute has found that an extension through 2012 would create or save more than 500,000 jobs. ¹ In addition to providing an urgent safety net for laid-off workers, the extension of unemployment benefits has a positive stimulative effect because the money is quickly recycled through the economy, particularly by the long-term unemployed.

It would be unprecedented for Congress to allow the program to expire at current unemployment levels. Congress has provided emergency UI relief in every major recession since the 1950s and has never allowed the program to expire when unemployment was higher than 7.2 percent. It would be unconscionable to put additional strings on this relief that do not address the real causes of the current unemployment crisis.

In addition to extending UI, our tax policies must also help people in the greatest need. We urge you to extend the payroll tax cut enacted in the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010. If this tax cut is allowed to expire, the economic forecasting firm Macroeconomic Advisors predicts that it will decrease the GDP by 0.5 percent and result in the loss of 400,000 jobs by the end of next year. ² Countless numbers of working families will be pushed deeper into poverty, and the purchasing power they bring to the economy will be further weakened, undermining a nascent economic recovery. An extension of this important tax cut should be offset through the revenue increases and savings identified in The Middle Class Tax Cut Act of 2011 (S. 1944), introduced last week by Sen. Robert Casey (D-PA).

For these reasons, we urge you to support a one-year unemployment insurance extension and the extension of the payroll tax cut. These vital forms of relief will help the most vulnerable Americans while also helping to sustain our country’s recovery.

Sincerely,

Wade Henderson
President & CEO

Nancy Zirkin
Executive Vice President

 1 Heidi Shierholz and Larry Mishel, “Labor market will lose over half a million jobs if UI extensions expire in 2012,” Economic Policy Institute, Nov. 4, 2011, at http://www.epi.org/publication/labor-market-lose-million-jobs-
ui-extensions/

 2 Jia Lynn Yang, “Debt panel’s collapse puts payroll tax cut at risk,” Washington Post, Nov. 22, 2011, at http://www.washingtonpost.com/todays_paper/A%20Section/2011-11-22/A/7/32.1.3127381816_epaper.html