You know, I don't like when people talk about generous unemployment benefits because unemployment benefits are there to help people in very difficult, bad times.

Extending emergency unemployment benefits isn't just the right thing to do for our families - it's the smart thing to do for our economy.

Not only do unemployment benefits help families who are hurting; they also put money into their pockets that they'll then spend - and their spending will keep other Americans in jobs.

In a very weak economy, when you say 'cut government spending,' what you mean is you're laying off school teachers and you're de-funding various programs that put money into the economy. This means you have more unemployed people that then draw unemployment benefits and don't pay taxes.

Let me just try to give you sort of the intuitive one here on the stimulus funds. If you have a two-person economy - let's imagine we have two farms, and that's the whole world, just two farms. If one of those farmers gets unemployment benefits, who do you think pays for him? Am I going way over your heads today?

More broadly, we are going to have to examine the safety net programs to make sure they are poised to catch the families before they fall even more, especially in the areas of unemployment benefits, child care assistance, and foster care.

Mr. Trump's fiscal policies have produced more growth than Mr. Obama's because they were designed to incentivize businesses to invest, hire, and produce more here at home. The Obama 'stimulus,' by contrast, went for food stamps, unemployment benefits, ObamaCare subsidies, 'cash for clunkers' and failed green energy handouts.

I have a lot of hard-working, blue-collar people in my district who are at the end of their unemployment benefits.

More people on unemployment benefits is not success in America, fewer people on not because we kicked them off but because they have been able to get a job in the private sector, because government got out of the way.

They keep extending these unemployment benefits to the point where people are afraid to go out and get a job, because the job doesn't pay as much as the unemployment benefit does.

With unemployment benefits, you don't get health care. You don't build your pension up. You don't build all of those programs that you need to move forward.

In 2012, I helped lead the successful effort in Congress to allow states to conduct drug testing of people receiving unemployment benefits.

High mandated minimum wages will throw people out of work and onto the welfare rolls in cases where unemployment benefits exist. When it comes to welfare payments, they obey the laws of economics, too. Indeed, if something - like unemployment - is subsidized, more of it will be produced.

I've heard the argument that unemployment benefits somehow act as a disincentive to the long-term unemployed when it comes to looking for work, but the opposite is true. Unemployment Insurance serves as a powerful incentive for people to keep searching for jobs, rather than drop out of the labor force altogether.

Speaker Pelosi says unemployment benefits are economic stimulus. Those are bare-bones benefits.