Top Republican supports increasing NC unemployment benefits, with a caution about the past
Increasing the amount of unemployment benefits received bipartisan support in a North Carolina House committee on Tuesday, and the Senate leader also agrees an increase is needed.
Raising the level of unemployment benefits is “something that we need to do,” Senate leader Phil Berger, an Eden Republican, told reporters on Wednesday.
Berger leads a Republican supermajority in the Senate, and his support of proposed legislation greatly increases the chance of it becoming law.
Berger didn’t commit to the $100 weekly increase that was in a House bill that passed that chamber’s finance committee, which would mean someone could receive up to $450, rather than $350, a week if they lost their job through no fault of their own.
“I do think we need to raise it,” he said. “We need to look at the actuarial stuff and figure out where we are. We got ourselves into a real pickle back in the recession, the 2008-2009 recession. We clearly don’t want anything that comes close to repeating that. So we’ll have to be careful about what we do.”
The state’s unemployment insurance fund has a balance of $5 billion, a major increase over the $1 billion it had after the recession, when North Carolina and other states had to be bailed out with federal loans.
House Finance Senior Chair Julia Howard, a Mocksville Republican, initially proposed raising the unemployment cap amount to $400 a week, and agreed with Democratic Rep. Deb Butler’s amendment to increase the benefit in House Bill 48, if it becomes law, to $450. It was a rare win for Democrats on the committee, who all voted in favor along with all the Republicans.
Republicans have a majority in the House.
Unemployment fund ‘very healthy’ compared to recession
Like Berger, Howard also cautioned about repeating the past.
“In 2013 we were in a world of hurt,” Howard said Tuesday, but after paying off the state’s debt to the federal government, leaders have “created a very healthy fund.”
Senate Democratic Leader Sydney Batch told reporters after the Senate session on Wednesday that she’d like to see an even larger increase.
Batch said “$100 (more) is actually better than what we have, but it certainly isn’t going to go far enough for families that are struggling,” she said.
This story was originally published February 12, 2025 at 6:21 PM with the headline "Top Republican supports increasing NC unemployment benefits, with a caution about the past."
.jpg)