ATLANTA – Eligible Georgians will continue to receive the $300 weekly unemployment checks Congress approved last week without a lapse, even though President Donald Trump signed the bill a day after the program’s Dec. 26 expiration date.
Claimants who were still receiving the payments as of the week ending the day after Christmas will get a check next week without any interruption in unemployment benefits, the Georgia Department of Labor announced Thursday.
The newly reauthorized federal benefits also will go to claimants receiving at least $1 in weekly state unemployment benefits, beginning with the week ending Jan. 2.
The labor department is reviewing guidelines from the U.S. Department of Labor before distributing payments to claimants who exhausted their benefits on or before Dec. 26.
“Our teams will work through the holiday weekend to make sure we can issue payments next week for all claimants who are eligible for the extension with funds still available in their claim, including issuance of the new $300 [federal] supplemental payment,” Georgia Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said.
“We are continuing to work with the [U.S. labor department] on the specific operational guidelines to set up payments for all claimants eligible for the extensions, but some of these guidelines include complicated regulations that require extensive system programming.”
The state Department of Labor encourages Georgia claimants to continue requesting weekly payments. The agency will work to release all eligible payments as quickly as possible after operational specifics are received and implemented.
While additional $2,000 economic stimulus checks for Americans supported by Trump and congressional Democrats remain stuck in the U.S. Senate, Congress did pass a $900 billion stimulus package back on Dec. 21. The package includes an extension of the $300 weekly unemployment checks that would have expired otherwise.
Meanwhile, first-time unemployment claims in Georgia fell by 7,713 last week to 18,960.
Since the coronavirus pandemic first took hold in Georgia last March, the labor department has paid out more than $16.7 billion in state and federal unemployment benefits to more than 4.2 million Georgians, more than the last nine years combined.
The job sector accounting for the most initial unemployment claims last week was accommodations and food services with 5,495 claims. The manufacturing job sector was next with 2,057, followed by administrative and support services with 1,968.
More than 164,000 jobs are listed online at EmployGeorgia.com for Georgians to access. The labor department offers online resources for finding a job, building a resume, and assisting with other reemployment needs.
ATLANTA – Legislation the General Assembly passed this year covering a wide range of subjects from health care to law enforcement to Georgia’s foster care system will take effect with the new year.
Here is a summary of key bills that will take effect Jan. 1:
House Bill 888 takes aim at the practice of “surprise billing” by requiring health insurance companies to cover emergency services a patient receives whether or not the provider is a participant in the patient’s insurance network, leaving it to providers and insurers to settle their differences through arbitration.
House Bill 911 prohibits foster parents from engaging in improper sexual behavior with children in their care, closing a loophole in current state law. The measure was part of Georgia First Lady Marty Kemp’s initiative to better protect foster children.
House Bill 838 is aimed at protecting police and other first responders from bias-motivated crimes committed because of the victims’ “actual or perceived employment as a first responder.” Legislative Republicans pushed the bill as a companion measure to passage of the state’s first hate crimes law.
House Bill 1037 puts the state’s popular film tax credit under additional scrutiny by requiring all film productions located in Georgia to undergo mandatory audits by the Georgia Department of Revenue or third-party auditors. It also tightens rules governing how film companies transfer or sell unused tax credits to other businesses.
House Bill 244 assigns the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) the task of deciding how much the state’s electric membership cooperatives can charge telecommunications providers for broadband attachments to their utility poles, a bid to promote the expansion of rural broadband service. The new rates set by the PSC will take effect July 1.
Senate Bill 426 requires manufacturers that use the cancer-causing chemical ethylene oxide to report any waste spills or gas releases to the state within 24 hours. The director of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division then must post the information on the agency’s website.
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp said Wednesday he’s focused on Georgia’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and next week’s runoffs for the state’s two U.S. Senate seats, calling everything else a “distraction.”
Kemp was responding to criticism leveled by President Donald Trump earlier Wednesday. In a Twitter post, Trump called on the Republican governor to resign for his “obstructionist” refusal to interfere in the awarding of Georgia’s 16 Electoral College votes to President-elect Joe Biden.
Trump continues to claim he carried Georgia in the Nov. 3 election, despite Biden winning nearly 12,000 more votes in the Peach State than the president, a result that has been certified by several recounts that found no evidence of widespread fraud.
“I’ve supported the president. I worked as hard as anybody in this state for his reelection,” Kemp told reporters during a news conference at the Georgia Capitol. “But at the end of the day, I have to follow the law and the Constitution.”
Kemp said he’s focused instead on getting Georgians stricken with COVID-19 who require hospitalization a hospital bed. He said state public health officials are working to reopen the Georgia World Congress Center as an overflow care facility for coronavirus patients as soon as possible.
Health-care workers also are busy vaccinating Georgia nursing home patients, an effort that began this week.
“I met with [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] Director [Dr. Robert] Redfield today,” Kemp said. “I gave him a lot of credit on Monday when he started rolling out vaccines to nursing homes.”
Kemp said he’s also working hard to ensure the reelection of Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler on Jan. 5 “to save our country from socialism, defunding the police and the Green New Deal,” echoing campaign themes the GOP incumbents have sounded in their campaigns against Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock.
“I don’t want to wake up Jan. 6 wondering what else I could have done,” the governor said. “I’ve done everything I can.”
Kemp also defended the Georgia Bureau of Investigation against criticism by Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and a former New York City Mayor. Giuliani dismissed as “a joke” a signature match audit of absentee ballots in Cobb County the GBI helped conduct that found no evidence of fraud.
Kemp said he was glad Secretary of State Brian Raffensperger ordered the audit and that the GBI did a good job on it.
The governor’s news conference came shortly after state lawmakers on the Georgia Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Elections wrapped up a fourth hearing on the Nov. 3 election that rehashed disputed fraud claims and drew witnesses who had already testified at the Capitol in recent weeks. Giuliani was among the witnesses making a repeat appearance.
Beau Evans of Capitol Beat News Service contributed to this report.
ATLANTA – Madeline Ramos and Louis Sanville made history this month when they became the University System of Georgia’s first nexus degree graduates.
Ramos and Sanville completed the 60 credit hours required to graduate from Columbus State University with nexus degrees in film production.
Columbus became the first of the system’s 26 colleges and universities to offer the nexus degree when the Board of Regents approved the new program two years ago.
The nexus is the first type of degree created in America since the associate’s degree came into being in the 1890s.
“A lot has changed in 100 years. We need to create a new degree for a new time,” said Tristan Denley, the university system’s executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.
“The days when people would come here, get some education and go off to work, those days are over. People will have 10 to a dozen careers in their lifetime. … The nexus degree brings all that together, a new kind of degree for a new time.”
The nexus degree grew out of the College 2025 program system Chancellor Steve Wrigley introduced in 2017 to better tailor course offerings to Georgia’s 21st century workforce needs.
Film production, one of the state’s fastest growing industries, fit in well with the nexus degree program’s goals. Film was among the careers then-Gov. Nathan Deal singled out when he created an initiative offering full tuition coverage to students majoring in certain fields.
“Governor Deal recognized there were careers in high demand and not enough people with qualifications to be able to be successful,” Denley said. “Many of the nexus degrees created over the last year or so have been along those lines.”
Thus far, the university system has developed eight nexus degree programs. Columbus State features three, not only film production but financial technology and cybersecurity – offered as a combined degree – and public safety.
Two nexus degrees – blockchain with machine learning, a subset of artificial intelligence, and blockchain with data analytics – are offered at Albany State University.
Georgia Gwinnett College offers a nexus degree in soundstage production, Clayton State University in nonprofit and governmental accounting and Georgia Highlands College in the logistics of financial technology.
A nexus degree requires 60 hours of coursework, the same as an associate’s degree, including 42 hours of general education and 18 hours focusing on the specific area of study. Those 18 hours are further divided into 12 hours of upper division coursework and at least six hours of experiential learning such as an internship.
“It’s a completely standalone credential,” Denley said. “There may well be a student who already has a degree. They may want to come back for that additional 18 hours because they’ve already satisfied the general education requirement. We’re certainly seeing students do that.”
Ramos, 23, a native of Texas, spent two years at other colleges before transferring to Columbus State for her final two years plus an extra semester.
“It was convenient,” she said. “One of the classes I was taking aligned with the degree program. It was kind of an add-on.”
In completing the nexus degree requirements, Ramos was able to gain hands-on experience in the camera department of a film production.
“I worked on a film set in different departments so I could figure out exactly what I liked to do,” she said. “Through that, I was able to talk to professionals [and] keep in touch.”
Ramos said she doesn’t have a job lined up yet, with the film industry being slowed by the coronavirus pandemic. But she said there are enough job prospects out there for her to want to remain here.
“I plan on staying in Georgia with the film opportunities,” she said.
Denley said Georgia is the only state in the country offering nexus degrees. But that may not be the case for long.
“When something’s new, others are watching us to see how it unfolds,” he said.
ATLANTA – The tax cuts President Donald Trump steered through Congress in 2017 will save the average Georgia household more than $39,000 over their lifetime, a new study has found.
But according to another broader study of tax cuts in multiple countries going back to 1965, tax cuts provide a huge windfall to big corporations and wealthy individuals without producing long-term economic growth or sustained business investment.
A study released this month by Boston University professor Laurence Kotlikoff to coincide with the third anniversary of the Trump tax cuts comes on the heels of an earlier study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta that estimated the gain for Georgia families at $22,676 on average because of the impact of personal income tax reductions.
The new study, funded by the Goodman Institute for Public Policy Research, a free market think tank, includes the effect of reducing corporate taxes.
Lower corporate tax rates attract capital from abroad, raise wages and create greater economic expansion in Georgia and in other states, said John Goodman, the institute’s president.
“We used to have one of the highest corporate tax rates in the world,” Goodman said. “High corporate taxes drive capital offshore and that’s bad for American workers. With the lower rates we have now, we are more competitive.”
The Goodman Institute study comes as President-elect Joe Biden prepares to roll back the Trump tax cuts benefitting the wealthiest Americans and businesses. However, the Democrat has vowed not to raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year.
Tax policy also has been issue during Georgia’s two U.S. Senate runoff races, with Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock opposing the Trump tax cuts and incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler pledging to preserve them.
The Goodman Institute study shows that many Georgians would be better off in the short run if Biden’s economic plan is adopted in full. That’s because of Biden’s proposal for a more generous child tax credit and more generous benefits for low-income seniors.
But Goodman said the Biden plan comes with long-term costs.
“When today’s children become adults, their wages will be lower and the economy will be less prosperous because of the way these benefits are funded,” Goodman said.
The broader study, conducted by the London School of Economics, concluded tax cuts lead to greater income inequality but have no meaningful impact on unemployment or economic growth.
The study examined five decades of tax cuts in 18 wealthy nations from 1965 to 2015, including two Reagan-era tax cuts in 1981 and 1986, which dramatically reduced the top income-tax rate from 70% to 28%.
The study found that tax cuts promote income inequality. The share of national income flowing to the top 1% increased by about 0.8%.
While employment and economic growth fluctuated slightly following major tax cuts, the report found the impact statistically indistinguishable from zero.
The study’s authors, David Hope and Julian Limberg, concluded that the momentum behind enacting tax cuts comes from the power of wealthy corporations and individuals to set public policy agendas.
“There is a large political science literature on the power of rich voters and organized business interests to shape public policies in their favor,” Hope and Limberg wrote.
