As lawmakers continue to meet in the 2022 Iowa Legislative Session, unemployment changes will be an important topic for legislators.

State Senator for District 10 Jake Chapman says there is a lot of conversation surrounding unemployment an potential changes . Chapman says that Iowa has a fairly rich unemployment system where people can qualify for up to 26 weeks of unemployment. 

“Under the Biden Administration, there was a lot of benefits for people to go on unemployment and we are about 10,000 workers short of where we were prior to COVID-19 and so trying to get those people back to work.”

Chapman tells Raccoon Valley Radio there needs to be incentives for people returning to work and focus needs to be placed on getting people back into the workforce much sooner.

“One of those incentives, frankly, is what we are working on when it comes to our tax policy. We want to not penalize people for working, we don’t want to tax them more because they are going and working or finding another job, but we want to provide incentive that, you work hard, you make a living, you can keep more of the money you’ve earned and so that’s why we are really pushing to reduce income tax here in this state.”

Chapman says lawmakers will continue to look at addressing the workforce shortage and unemployment changes throughout the State of Iowa during the 2022 Iowa Legislative Session.