Scary and Depressing Times
Extended unemployment benefits are ending, with jobs nowhere in sight:
Over the coming months, as many as 1.5 million jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment insurance benefits, ending what for some has been a last bulwark against foreclosures and destitution.
Because of emergency extensions already enacted by Congress, laid-off workers in nearly half the states can collect benefits for up to 79 weeks, the longest period since the unemployment insurance program was created in the 1930s. But unemployment in this recession has proved to be especially tenacious, and a wave of job-seekers is using up even this prolonged aid.
Tens of thousands of workers have already used up their benefits, and the numbers are expected to soar in the months to come, reaching half a million by the end of September and 1.5 million by the end of the year, according to new projections by the National Employment Law Project, a private research group.
Congress almost certainly will need to put through another 13-week extension:
“If more help is not on the way, by September a huge wave of workers will start running out of their critical extended benefits, and many will have nothing left to get by on even as work keeps getting harder to find,” said Maurice Emsellem, a policy director of the employment law project.
For many desperate job seekers, any extension will seem a blessing. Pamela C. Lampley of Dillon, S.C., said she sat outside the post office last month and cried because “it was the first Wednesday in quite some time that I’ve gone to the mailbox and left without an unemployment check.” The jobless rate in her state is 12.1 percent.
I know that feeling. It’s not a good one.
3 Responses to “Scary and Depressing Times”
92 weeks? Wow, I have all the sympathy in the world for someone who is having trouble finding work, but maybe after close to 2 years you need to figure something out. Help is one thing but sometimes to much can cripple. I will say I don't like how unemployment tends to make partial employment or “underemployment” (term Texas uses when the pay for your current job is less than 1/2 your base for unemployment) financialy absurd. there should be greater incentive for any and all employment while under unemployment.
The Federal Government should pick up the tab for those loosing their unemployment insurance benefits. Simply cancel paying for the, “Klunkers Trade in”, program and get three billion dollars right away. Then take the rest out of corporate tax right offs and incentives across the board. If that's still not enough, sell Alaska back to Russia and all the Alaskans as indentured servants for life.
No need to give any money to those lazy indolent idiots who showed such a lack of judgment by working in dying industries or professions in direct competition with China & India, just a map with the location of the local banks & elites and an opportunity for them to make good use of the second amendment.