House committee discusses unemployment insurance
INDIANAPOLIS – With more than 8 percent of Hoosiers out of work, state lawmakers on Thursday discussed ways to make sure the state can pay for unemployment checks itself, rather than continuing to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government to cover those payments.
Department of Workforce Development Commissioner Teresa Voors told the House Labor and Unemployment Committee the state has already borrowed $300 million through a federal government credit line. She said unless the Legislature refills the state's unemployment insurance trust fund coffers, it will have to continue borrowing money to write unemployment checks.
After heated questioning, lawmakers said it's crucial to fix the state's starved unemployment insurance trust fund.
“This is going to be a highly emotional issue. We have a lot to cover,” said the committee's chair, Rep. David L. Niezgodski, D-South Bend. “I, everyone else at this table and the rest of the General Assembly has got to play a role. We have got to do this in a bipartisan means.”
Business officials testified, too.
“Unemployment isn’t going down, it’s going up,” said George Raymond with the Indiana Chamber of Commerce about the newly released 8.2 percent unemployment rate of Indiana.
While many agree that something must be done to reverse the problem of the unemployment insurance trust fund, not many solutions were brought forth.
“We ought to plan for what we [have] before us,” said Ed Roberts of the Indiana Manufacturers Association. “We’ve got about 50 patches that we’ve been building for years. The question is which of the patches needs to be sown together to make the quilt.”
