Bush Will Seek a Compromise on Added Weeks of Jobless Pay

President Bush wants to extend emergency unemployment compensation through 1992, but opposes any change in basic rules or spending increases that would break the budget agreement with Congress, Labor Secretary Lynn Martin said Wednesday.

Martin said Bush hopes to reach agreement with Congress as to how to stretch the emergency program--now due to expire July 4--”through the election season” and beyond, because he is “concerned about our country’s unemployed men and women, about their families, about their future.”

Martin said she opposed a measure introduced last week by Rep. Thomas J. Downey (D-N.Y.) that would provide for up to 20 weeks of extra benefits for 1.5 million jobless Americans. Downey’s proposal, she said, would make permanent changes in the unemployment compensation program and would require a tax increase, both of which the Administration opposes.

Downey’s proposal would lower the minimum earnings required so that 200,000 more people would be eligible for unemployment benefits, sponsors say. It would be financed by continuing limits on personal exemptions and itemized deductions for high-income taxpayers. Those limits, imposed in 1990, are set to expire in 1995.

Bush killed two unemployment benefit bills passed by Congress last year, but accepted a compromise last fall and worked out an agreement with Democrats in February, when the first round of benefits was about to expire.

Both Downey and Martin said the issue should be nonpartisan, but Downey said he was disappointed that the Administration will offer jobless Americans only “half a loaf of help.”

“By refusing to endorse the permanent changes in the unemployment insurance system which are included in my proposal, the labor secretary has said now is not the time for reform,” said Downey, acting chairman of the House Ways and Means subcommittee on human resources.

The recession has shown the “unemployment insurance system is broken and needs to be fixed,” Downey said. “If we do not do this now, then when does the Bush Administration think is the right time?”

Under the current program, out-of-work people can qualify for 26 weeks of regular benefits, then 26 or 33 more weeks of coverage, depending on the rates of unemployment in their states.