UI and Wage Insurance

I have to admit that I had no desire to watch McCain's speech but Kevin Drum noticed that McCain talked about wage insurance and wondered if this was a new proposal from the McCain campaign. As far as I can tell from searching the McCain website and reading an old op ed by Holtz-Eakin, it is a new proposal.

I like the idea of wage insurance and wrote a post advocating that Obama propose it back in February.

I think the key is whether this is going to be part of a larger package that basically tries to gut the existing UI system (as Bush proposed to do back in 2004 --I believe). The rhetoric then was "the ownership society" and no doubt McCain will call it "reform". I suspect that they know that with the debates coming up McCain has to have something to say to the growing ranks of the unemployed and he took the opportunity to sneak it in to the convention speech so it wasn't coming out of nowhere.