The reported quick passage and signing of a bill extending benefits, while record unemployment levels are being reported, was, for example per an AP feed, carried here.
Given how Minnesota and other states must conform their UI plans to meet nationwide Dept. of Labor mandates, all other states, like Minnesota, base an employer's future payments into the UI pool upon an "experience rating." So, benefits are extended, the money comes from the pool, the pool needs replenishment, and the experience rating is impacted due to additional benefit payments causing the rating to rise.
That means businesses, while seeking a recovery, will be paying higher UI tax payments, nationwide as well as in Minnesota, and the small firms with one or two employees providing goods and services to other small firms, and experiencing cash flow problems as vendors press for prompter payments and customers use "float" with their vendors in place of institutional short-term credit - given the credit crunch - and all of that seems a recipe for greater disaster in a downturn, and suggests a prolongation of hard times rather than a more prompt recovery.
Am I wrong? Is this a counterproductive measure, without other small business relief? What is the Chamber of Commerce saying on national and local levels?
One thing is probably a certainty - DEED will not fire bureaucrats or streamline its adjudication and UI payments mechanisms. It does not even require face-to-face or paper reporting, instead a toy dial-and-file reporting thing is in place, allowing simpler employee responses and longer DEED staff coffee breaks. They do not even ask whether laid-off employees are staying in contact with their former employers to assure that ex-employees are periodically checking in and requesting work, if available.
Go figure.
It is pure and simple inexcusably negligent bureaucratic performance.
Or am I wrong?