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CNN Live Event/Special

Daschle Discusses Jobless Benefits

Aired September 26, 2002 - 10:38   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Tom Daschle is speaking live now on Capitol Hill. We are going to dip into that.
(JOINED IN PROGRESS)

SEN. TOM DASCHLE (D-SD), MAJORITY LEADER: ... the last recession in the early '90s, the Congress extended unemployment benefits three different times, providing those benefits throughout that period. We witnessed the extraordinarily soft economy that generated the unemployment in the first place. Three times.

Well, this year we have only done it once. We did it after a great deal of arm twisting and hand wringing, but we did it. Now, the time has come to do it again. We have a comparison here of the millions of workers who will exhaust their benefits during the period of recession and jobless economic recovery.

In 1992, during the recession, 1.4 million workers lost their unemployment benefits. That's already been exceeded in this recession, and economic jobless recovery by 2.2 million. So, we have seen a disparity already of the number of people experiencing the expiration of unemployment benefits has gone that high, to 2.2 million people. So we are asking the administration to join with us in passing this extension of the unemployment...

KAGAN: We have been listening in a little bit to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. We thought might -- maybe we were going to get a little bit of the fiery politics we got yesterday on the floor of the Senate. Instead, we got a dry lesson in economics.

So, we are going to get out of that.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com






Aired September 26, 2002 - 10:38   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Tom Daschle is speaking live now on Capitol Hill. We are going to dip into that.
(JOINED IN PROGRESS)

SEN. TOM DASCHLE (D-SD), MAJORITY LEADER: ... the last recession in the early '90s, the Congress extended unemployment benefits three different times, providing those benefits throughout that period. We witnessed the extraordinarily soft economy that generated the unemployment in the first place. Three times.

Well, this year we have only done it once. We did it after a great deal of arm twisting and hand wringing, but we did it. Now, the time has come to do it again. We have a comparison here of the millions of workers who will exhaust their benefits during the period of recession and jobless economic recovery.

In 1992, during the recession, 1.4 million workers lost their unemployment benefits. That's already been exceeded in this recession, and economic jobless recovery by 2.2 million. So, we have seen a disparity already of the number of people experiencing the expiration of unemployment benefits has gone that high, to 2.2 million people. So we are asking the administration to join with us in passing this extension of the unemployment...

KAGAN: We have been listening in a little bit to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. We thought might -- maybe we were going to get a little bit of the fiery politics we got yesterday on the floor of the Senate. Instead, we got a dry lesson in economics.

So, we are going to get out of that.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com