State Sen. Kirk Watson reviews the bidding on how the state of Texas has handled its unemployment issues.
As was noted during this past legislative session by Workforce Commission Chairman Tom Pauken (who was appointed by the Governor and once led the Texas Republican Party), unemployment assistance is not a welfare program. It exists to provide temporary help to Texans in tough, sometimes tragic, situations so they can find work without losing their homes, cars, or electricity. And it protects the economy as much as the people who need it.
The commission’s job is to figure out how much money the state needs for unemployment benefits, what to charge businesses that support the program, and how to prepare for things like economic recessions that send the state’s unemployment rate skyrocketing.
And as you may have noticed over the last few days, the commission isn’t doing any of those things very well.
He then provides a nice itemized list of the ways that the TWC and Governor Perry have screwed up or fallen short in this. The TWC has now taken emergency action to avoid needlessly cutting off some 15,000 people’s unemployment insurance. And hey, lookie here, some actual campaign-related activity from Camp KBH:
Rising unemployment in Texas has become an escalating issue in Perry’s re-election campaign. He says his policies have created jobs and helped insulate the state from the worst of the national recession, but on Monday, U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison’s campaign called those assertions “political spin.”
“Maybe with all of the double talk coming out of the governor’s office, they haven’t had time to notice that our state has lost 266,300 jobs over the past year,” Hutchison spokesman Hans Klingler said.
Klingler used to be a spokesperson for the state GOP, so he knows his doubletalk. Hitting Perry on job losses is about as good a strategy as any I could think of. The question is in what way will you actually be different than him as Governor. Needless to say, I think Watson would make for a much sharper contrast than KBH would, assuming she ever gets around to trying.
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