The Democrats in the Senate fought for an emergency 3 month extension to the regular unemployment benefits because they figure this thing could rage well past November.

I suspect the Republicans do as well, but they fought the extension because they don't care about regular people and because in some of their minds, there's always plenty of jobs anyway regardless of what the facts are.

I suspect the shutdowns could go on for 9 months. Obviously, if it doesn't and people do get called back to work early, they have to stop taking the unemployment because it's not a request. The checks just stop.

But the 3 month extension doesn't give 9 months to everyone.

Some states cut unemployment down to 10-12 weeks because they're Republicans and they said this would prod people to take anything they could get (which is sometimes nothing).

So if you're in South Carolina, this just brings you back up to the bare minimum unemployment period that mainstream economists recommend, which is 6 months.

When the economy gets very bad and nobody is hiring, and you cut unemployment, there will be more bad actors, like Burger King, which see it as an opportunity to cut wages for people who were only making about $9 to begin with.

The general consensus of Washington used to be to protect people from random misfortune, and this is as random and unfortunate as it gets. If we start everything back up again the virus will accelerate and claim more lives.

But the only thing the Republicans wanted to bail out are irresponsible big corporations that brought most of their problems on themselves by spending 96% of their profits on share buybacks, which is definitely a moral hazard, but they don't care.

Maybe we should tell our Republican friends to send their additional 13 weeks of unemployment back.

Just an observation.