When President George W. Bush and Senators Clinton and Kennedy agree on a domestic spending measure, it’s a good indication that those of us outside the Beltway should watch our wallets. Into this category falls the call for a “temporary” expansion of unemployment benefits.

Americans who have lost their jobs already qualify, in most cases, for 26 weeks of unemployment benefits. In March, Congress passed a “temporary emergency” extension of the benefits — an additional 13 weeks for most workers. That extension will expire on Saturday, December 28. And, naturally, the Beltway crowd wants to extend it, proving that when Congress passes any “temporary emergency” spending measure, in most cases it is neither temporary nor an emergency.

In a December 14 radio address, Mr. Bush said, “When our legislators return to the Capitol, I ask them to make the extension of unemployment benefits a first order of business.” Senators Clinton, Schumer, and Kennedy, for their part, had backed a bill extending the benefits.

One voice of relative sanity in this discussion has been Rep. Bill Thomas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “There is no free lunch,” said a statement issued by the committee. “Higher benefits today require higher taxes, or reduced benefits, tomorrow.”

Senator Clinton says extending benefits would help the economy. But even the New York Times concluded the exact opposite in a news article in September. “The expiration of benefits typically helps the economy, forcing people to find work eventually and preventing unemployment stretches from reaching the length they do in Europe, where benefits are more generous, economists say,” the Times article said. The man who served as chief economist at the Department of Labor during part of the Clinton administration, Lawrence Katz, co-authored a 1990 study that found longer benefits lead to more and longer unemployment. A 13-week extension of unemployment benefits from 1978 to 1983 added 2.2 weeks to the average duration of unemployment for recipients. The 2.2 week increase in average duration of benefits causes the overall unemployment rate to be 5.4% higher than it would otherwise be, the study showed.

You don’t need to be a Ph.D. economist to understand this. A couple of months ago, the Times Styles section featured an article on laid-off Wall Streeters that adopted a name for themselves: the 405 Club. The Times described it as “a reference to an evening last year when a group of unemployed investment bankers jestingly tried to pay an $800 dinner bill at Craft, in the Flatiron district, by signing over their $405 unemployment checks — the maximum benefit offered by the Labor Department.” Even Mrs. Clinton should understand — some of the workers from her 2000 Senate campaign ended up collecting unemployment when the campaign disbanded after the election.

The problem with unemployment benefits is the same as it was with pre-reform welfare. When you pay people not to work, there will always be people who take advantage.

Meanwhile, the bill for these benefits is paid by taxes imposed on companies; the costs are passed along to workers in the form of lower wages. Why those workers, some of whom earn low wages, should end up subsidizing out-of-work investment bankers dining at fancy restaurants and Democratic operatives working on their graduate school applications is beyond us.

If the Bush administration and the senators want to make the case that America should have more generous welfare benefits for the truly poor, they should do so on the merits. The best context for such a debate would be the reauthorization of the 1996 welfare reform legislation. That is a chance to revisit all the questions about asset limits and work requirements. But rolling back welfare reform by the backdoor method of the “temporary emergency” extension of unemployment benefits is a ploy that only the Beltway crowd could dream up.