■ EDITORIAL:
Sen. Rick Scott’s contempt for the unemployed goes back to his days as governor, and it’s why he was among the few trying to undermine aid in this time of national crisis.
On Wednesday night, four U.S. senators briefly held up a $2 trillion stimulus plan designed to help our nation weather this economic storm.
Their beef: The unemployment benefits were too generous.
No surprise here in Florida that one of the holdouts was U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, whose disdain for the unemployed goes back a decade.
Scott’s chief concern with the stimulus bill was that if people made too much money from unemployment benefits they wouldn’t be interested in going back to work.
“We should boost the Unemployment Insurance program to help those that need it most,” Scott tweeted Wednesday before he spoke on the Senate floor. “But when this crisis is over, we need people to get back in the workforce. We shouldn’t create the opposite incentive.”
As if the general public is more interested in eating bonbons and watching Oprah than holding a job.
This has been Scott’s way of thinking since he was Florida’s governor — the cynical belief that, given the opportunity to slack off and go on the government dole, people will choose sloth over work.
When he became governor in 2011, one of Scott’s first orders of business was overhauling the state’s unemployment benefits system.
The maximum weekly benefit already was a meager $275, one of the lowest in the nation. And that’s the maximum; someone making $10 an hour would get around $200 a week.
Scott and the Legislature moved on to other areas of opportunity, like reducing the duration of benefits to as little as 12 weeks.
Both of those provisions — maximum benefit and duration of benefit — could become key factors for out-of-work Floridians. The federal government’s stimulus plan gives workers an extra $600 on top of their state unemployment benefit.
Details of how that’ll fold into state plans aren’t clear just yet, but the end result could be that Scott’s policies as governor set Floridians up to receive less money over a shorter period of time than people in other states.
For the unemployed in Florida, just getting those benefits requires more suffering than it should.
Scott and the Legislature created a system to apply for benefits that’s unwieldy and frustrating. It works so poorly — so well, if you’re trying to discourage people from applying — that the percentage of unemployed Floridians who actually get benefits is one of the lowest in the nation.
On Thursday, we got a taste of just how breathtaking the unemployment crisis will become: The number of people applying for unemployment benefits across the nation was 3.3 million, with 74,000 in Florida alone.
The numbers probably would have been worse if Florida had a more efficient system for people to apply. This week saw widespread reports of people unable to use the online application system or get through by phone. Next week’s numbers may be even worse.
At least Gov. Ron DeSantis has waived some of the onerous unemployment obstacles put in place under Scott’s administration, like making the unemployed offer proof they’re looking for a job by contacting at least five employers per week.
This miserly, unwieldy unemployment system in Florida is Rick Scott’s legacy, his creation.
But there he was on Wednesday, once again trying his best to ensure the unemployed weren’t treated too well. In particular he wanted to ensure no one made more money through unemployment than they did in the job they had just lost.
At this moment in history, senator? If anything they’ll use that extra money to feed a starving economy. And the benefits aren’t going to last forever. So
if they’re momentarily better off financially? Our economy is on the brink. People are terrified.
Republican leaders, including President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, tried to discourage the rogue senators from obstructing the bill. The quartet of outliers were a tiny number even in their own party.
The Senate ultimately passed the bill Wednesday by a vote of 96-0.
All that drama so Scott could take another stab at making life harder on the unemployed, when they’re at their most vulnerable.
Hey senator, how about let’s get to work helping people at the time of their greatest need rather than trying to stiff them?