Dear Neighbor,
The House Democrats recently blocked a second effort to allow a floor vote on bipartisan Senate legislation that would prevent a significant unemployment payroll tax increase, despite having a historic multi-billion dollar state surplus.
The issue centers around the House DFL majority’s refusal to make whole the state’s unemployment insurance trust fund, which was depleted when Gov. Tim Walz shuttered Main Street businesses across the state during a lengthy and relentless exercise of emergency powers.
The state borrowed billions from the federal government to allow unemployment checks to continue to flow during the forced shutdown.
The fix is, (1) pay back the federal loan and stop the huge interest payments on the loan, which are estimated to be about $50,000 per day. (2) Restore the trust fund operating balance to pre-covid levels to stop the automatic payroll tax increases.
The House has had a veto-proof Senate bill in its possession for a month that does that, including preventing the automatic unemployment payroll tax increases required to restore the trust fund’s fiscal integrity.
This is politics at its worst. We have skyrocketing inflation eating up every family’s weekly paycheck. Now is not the time to impose additional unemployment payroll taxes, that only fuels more runaway inflation, increasing the cost of food, fuel and other necessary items for everyone.
Gov. Walz, House Republicans, Senate Republicans, and most Senate Democrats support a clean bill to fully replenish the trust fund back to pre-COVID levels.
The House DFL continues to hold that bill hostage and the March 15th deadline triggering automatic payroll tax increases has now passed. Their bill which is not a full fix, would result in six years of increased unemployment payroll taxes, has been sitting stagnant in a house committee since early February.
One of the excuses the House majority members use justifying the delay in preventing higher unemployment payroll taxes is it would benefit the big box stores, like Walmart, Target and the Amazons of the world.
I got news for them, we have 17 small cities in House District 10B, the closest thing we have to a big box store is a few Dollar General and Family Dollar stores.
Time to stop the nonsense and allow a vote to fix this problem!
Sincerely,
Dale