Michael Pope reports
When the pandemic began in 2020, Virginia started adding an extra $300 a week to unemployment benefits. It was an effort to help people through a very difficult period, although some conservatives criticized the extra money as paying people to stay unemployed.
Now Republican Senator Steve Newman of Bedford County says it s time to end the extra payments. “If we don t do this, we re going to continue to come up with additional deficits that we re going to have to fund at a later time, Newman said Monday, and you end up with a situation where we re actually paying people not to go back to work.