Democrat Demings: ?Shameful? DeSantis Would Want People to Work

Democrat Rep. Val Demings (D-FL), a candidate for U.S. Senate in the state of Florida, is slamming her state’s GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republicans like her opponent Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) for a move to cut off federal unemployment insurance benefits that have for months paid people more to stay home than to work.Demings said in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes on Monday evening:I really think it’s pretty shameful and thank you for mentioned that it is supported by Marco Rubio. But this program began paying people—combined with state benefits they concurrently receive—oftentimes more to stay home and collect unemployment than they would be paid to actually work.In states that are just beginning to reopen—mostly blue Democrat-run states like New York or California—this broader problem of the perverse incentives paying people more from the government to not work than they would make actually going to work has not yet materialized. The malaise could continue into the fall, and severely slow an economic recovery that Trump started but Biden has weighed down.Rubio, in a recent Tampa Bay Times oped published earlier in June, warned about the threat to the economy that continuing the benefits that pay people more not to work than to work represents:After a year of devastating human losses and debilitating lockdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus, small businesses in Tampa are staring down another challenge today: an inability to find new workers. Now that Biden has come into office though, Rubio said his team has hampered the PPP, distorting it so much it is unrecognizable, all while—and combined with the unemployment insurance mistakes from Washington, DC—causing more harm than good.“The worst thing that could happen is millions of people who work for a small business get laid off, spend months not working—so now, collecting unemployment—and it’s corrosive,” Rubio told Breitbart News in that interview.