A bill in the Ohio House of Representatives would substantially cut unemployment benefits to jobless Ohioans and make it harder to qualify. Yet paradoxically, while these harsh steps are aimed at making our unemployment trust fund financially solid, the bill doesn’t come close to even meeting its own solvency target.
Instead, it transfers most of the savings from benefit cuts to employers in the form of tax cuts – a bizarre “solution” to Ohio’s need to bolster this important fund. The result is an imbalanced plan that relies entirely on unemployed workers, and still does not get the fund close to where it needs to be.