A ringing question amid KY unemployment meltdown: ‘What are we going to do as a state?’

“What are we going to do as a state?” Latia Greenwell asked the other day as she stood in a Great Depression breadline tableau of people standing in line at the state Capitol to get their unemployment benefits.

Greenwell was referring to the unemployment insurance debacle that’s been going on since March, when COVID-19 first flattened the economy. A protest turned into a helpline as state officials realized how desperate many were to talk face to face about what they couldn’t get money they needed.

But her question is prescient because it’s exactly what we need to start thinking about in an election year. What kind of state do we want to be? The strangle-the-baby-in-the-bathtub-Ronald-Reagan lean and mean model so beloved of conservatives or one that can be of more help when the unforeseen comes crashing down?

Certainly the former has been winning in Kentucky as it slowly turns more red. As Jason Bailey of the Kentucky Center on Economic Policy reminded me, way back in 2010, when the federal government was performing its last big bailout, Kentucky actually turned down $90 million to modernize its unemployment system because it would have required the Legislature to change some eligibility requirements.

“All we had to do to get the money was make a few changes to eligibility that would let people qualify for UI that didn’t qualify,” he said, and neither the Democratic-led House nor the Republican Senate would do it. “There’s no doubt that we sowed the seeds of this by neglect, budget cuts, and under-investment.”

The Bevin administration piled on by closing unemployment centers and cutting staff. More centers around the state could have given the applicants the face to face time they need, instead of standing for hours in the hot sun.

That’s not to absolve Gov. Andy Beshear of all responsibility. Every journalist in the state gets at least one email a day from folks looking for UI help; he should have realized sooner that too many pieces of this puzzle were missing. He has pledged to do better in an unprecedented deluge of requests.

But state Republicans would do well to remember their own complicity before they continue to pop off on Twitter about his inadequacies.

After all there’s plenty of blame to go around in both parties. The real root of these problems is a bipartisan ostrich approach to comprehensive, meaningful tax reform that would apparently be too hard and too politically unpalatable to undergo, even though it would have eventually made our bottom-line more robust. Kentucky’s minimum wage is still $7.25. State employees haven’t gotten a raise nine out of the past 11 years, Bailey noted.

And let’s remember that the federal payments are soon supposed to end, without a commensurate return to the economy. This week’s unemployment lines could be a very small taste of what might happen when federal help dries up without the number of pre-COVID-19 jobs.

So do we like our government? Should it be strangled or do we think it should do more for us when crises like COVID-19 hit? Kentucky voters should ask candidates what our unemployment system should look like and what it should be able to do. It’s the voters who will have to decide now, and in November, ‘What are we going to do as a state?”

This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 12:06 PM.