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Politics & Government

Rockland's Unemployed Receive Retroactive Benefits

A new policy passed by Congress results in retroactive payments for Rocklanders and other New Yorkers.

A few thousand Rockland County residents were the beneficiaries a couple weeks ago of retroactive unemployment benefits after Congress recently passed an extension after months of wrangling.

The retroactive checks for New Yorkers were sent out in late July along with the resumption of benefits for those who had lost temporarily them, officials said. While the specific number of county residents who stopped receiving checks at the beginning of June was unavailable from the state Department of Labor, it did say there were 17,500 people in the seven-state Hudson Valley region that had been without benefits for seven weeks due to the lapse in extending the benefits by Congress.

Thom Kleiner, the department's Hudson Valley regional representative, said the money will be a big aid not only to local residents but the whole economy. The maximum weekly benefit in New York is $405.

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"It's a little bit of a safety net to help," he said. "(Also) people spend unemployment benefits; they don't horde them."

The unemployment benefits, which people pay into through payroll deductions from their pay checks, had been cut off to about 2.5 million Americans because of a political standoff in the U.S. Senate the past few months. 

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"This legislation extends unemployment benefits to millions of American families and workers," said U.S. Rep Eliot Engel, D-17. "Millions of people have lost weeks of benefits, after exhausting their state-paid benefits, due to the Republican filibuster in the Senate. The extension is retroactive, but that will not help those who have already had their car repossessed, or defaulted on a loan after months of waiting for help."

At first the issue was the size of the bill, which included several items other than the unemployment aid and whose cost topped $100 billion. After Democrats agreed to trim many facets of the bill, including extending the $25 weekly federal unemployment benefits called for in the stimulus bill and eliminating COBRA insurance subsidies to the recently unemployed.

The loss of the COBRA subsidies will be a financial burden on some who do not have access to health insurance other than through their former employer. However, COBRA benefits are only available for 18 months and some of the long-term unemployed already had reached that maximum time frame.

Even with the cuts, most Republicans opposed the measure because it would add $34 billion to a national debt that has hit about $13 trillion, arguing it should have been paid for with cuts to other programs, such as unspent money from last year's economic stimulus bill. Democrats countered that would be counter-productive because taking money from one area intended to stimulate the economy and using it for another (the unemployment benefits) would negate each other. They also pointed out previous extensions—under both Democrat and Republican control of Congress in the past few decades—never have been offset by other areas of the budget and always have been deficit spending.

Kleiner called the Republican view "short-sighted" and said the extension was the humane thing to do.

"It's sort of an odd time to decide that no bill will be passed without paying for it," he said.

"I don't think most Republicans truly understand what out-of-work Americans are going through," Engel added.

The debate took part as the nation's unemployment rate stood at 9.5 percent for June. The state's rate was 8.2 percent, down 1.2 percent from a January high of 8.4 percent. Rockland County's rate has been much lower than both those averages throughout the recession; in June it stood at 6.8 percent, down from a January high of 7.5 percent. As of June, there were 10,500 unemployed county residents, according to state statistics.

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