Nashville News Blog

Bredesen is exhibiting fine leadership here. The unemployment stimulus money is a very bad part of the stimulus package, and to put it into the category of "changes that were made by many other states a long time ago," makes it sound simple and casual. Yes, and those states are famously not "employer friendly" states, and they have the highest employer taxes anywhere. They pay huge weekly benefit amounts, give unemployment to large numbers of marginally eligible people and employers do not open new businesses there for that reason. They also have huge state income taxes, and lots more state revenue to pay for and support these programs.With the stimulus package money, certain congressmen decided we in Tennessee should do as they do, right now, or we can't have any unemployment stimulus money.

The trouble is, we are not set up to do this stuff, it would take an awful lot of time, work, staff and money to make these changes, (at a time when the state system is overwhelmed by the newly unemployed anyhow, and the state is about to lay off state employees) it would not benefit those already unemployed and drawing benefits at all, and what's more, Tennessee legislators are so stingy with funds, so unwilling to give anybody anything, that they may very well refuse to provide the necessary tax increases to keep the trust fund solvent and pay unemployment in the state at all. After all, these are the "bluest" legislators we've ever had, folks. Bredesen is fighting smart, to keep the state government systems in Tennessee working at all.

I suspect he'll figure out which of these new requirments will be the most reasonable and the least destructive to the state's currrent system and try to get them in place and take the money untimately.