The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights

Support Extension of Payroll Tax Cut and Unemployment Insurance

Advocacy Letter - 02/09/12

Source: The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
Recipient: Conferees

Dear Conferee on H.R. 3630, the Temporary Payroll Tax Cut Continuation Act of 2011:

On behalf of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, we urge you to support a clean extension, through the end of 2012, of the federal emergency unemployment insurance (UI) program and the payroll tax cut. These provisions will alleviate hardship for the most vulnerable while fostering economic growth for all. Congress must pass a proposal that ensures relief for 79 weeks, or 99 weeks in hardest-hit states. It must also reject any effort to impose burdensome new restrictions on who may obtain relief, or cuts off other relief for those who most need it.

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 month, putting millions of vulnerable workers and families at risk. Extending UI 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. Similarly, the Economic Policy Institute has found that an extension through 2012 would create or save more than 500,000 jobs.[i ] In addition to providing an urgent safety net, the extension of UI has this positive effect because the money is usually quickly spent, 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 the unemployment rate was higher than 7.2 percent.

In addition to extending UI, 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 2012.[ii ] 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. Our recovery could also be strengthened if you refuse to cut off small entrepreneurs’ access to unlicensed spectrum in the pursuit of shorter-term deficit needs, and instead allow them to utilize this public resource to create innovative services and high-tech jobs.

As Congress moves forward with these extensions, it must reject any effort to put additional strings on relief that do not address the real causes of the current unemployment crisis, such as the expansion of drug testing or GED requirements. Congress must also reject any effort to offset the cost of the extensions by simply cutting away other safety nets for low-income Americans. In particular, the House-passed restriction on eligibility for the Child Tax Credit would amount to a tax increase on many of the lowest-income families, would penalize millions of children, and would be counterproductive to our national economic recovery. It is especially unconscionable because there are far less harmful alternatives to offset the payroll tax cut – even the most modest increase in taxes on millionaires would result in higher offsets, without jeopardizing the ability of low-income parents to feed, clothe, and shelter their children.  

For these reasons, we urge you to support a clean extension of unemployment insurance and 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