Dems Have No Plans to Extend Unemployment Benefits (Washington Independent)

[chill_wind]

Dems Have No Plans to Extend Unemployment Benefits
By Mike Lillis 4/30/10 2:27 PM

As Congress continues to negotiate unemployment benefits legislation, Bloomberg has a story this week noting what few others have: that the so-called extension of benefits isn’t really an extension of benefits at all. Rather, it’s an extension of the filing deadline to apply for existing benefits, which have been capped at a maximum 99 weeks since last fall. And Congress has no plans to lengthen that span.

That, Bloomberg writes, spells bad news for a growing group of long-term unemployed workers who have exhausted all available help.

(Lawmakers) are quietly drawing the line at 99 weeks of aid, a mark that hundreds of thousands of Americans have already reached. In coming months, the number of those who will receive their final government check is projected to top 1 million.

As we noted recently, there’s really no group keeping a tally of how many Americans are exhausting their benefits. The Labor Department, for example, defines “long-term unemployment” as anything beyond 27 weeks, meaning that some workers falling into that category could have 18 months of benefits remaining. And a recent study from the Pew Charitable Trusts revealed that roughly 3.4 million people have been out of work for at least a year — which again, does nothing to indicate how many folks have exhausted their government benefits.

Bloomberg, for its part, based its estimates on state figures, which paint a pretty dismal portrait of the long-term unemployment problem.

read more: http://washingtonindependent.com/83673/dems-have-no-plans-to-extend-unemployment-benefits

[tavalon]

1. That's not good

It might speed revolt in the street, but it won't feed the people who've been out of work and trying like everything to get their toe hold again.

[lib2DaBone]

2. If benefits are not extended... what little recovery there is will grind to a halt..

..the problem is.. there is no money circulating in the economy. Goldman Sachs and the Banks have locked up all working capital.

What little money that is circulating is from Social Security and Unemployment payments.

We are following the exact path of Germany in 1929. As the depression deepened, right wing reactionaries cut off all public spending in the name of fiscal responsibility, which promptly drove the struggling economy into a depression.

This was just the opposite of what should have been done... massive public spending on public works projects and infrastructure, which would have returned money back into the economy 3 fold and spurred recovery.

[chill_wind]

3. It's a pretty scary mess. 26 states have run out of funds

according to data here:

Unemployment Insurance Tracker

* by Olga Pierce and Jeff Larson, ProPublica

"The unemployment insurance system is in crisis due to a combination skyrocketing unemployment and – in some cases – poor planning. A record 20 million Americans collected unemployment benefits last year, and twenty-six states have run out of funds and been forced to borrow from the federal government, raise taxes, or cut benefits. In many other states the situation is deteriorating fast. Using near real-time data on state revenues and the benefits they pay out, we estimate how long state trust funds will hold up."

There is a state-by-state tracker at the link:

http://projects.propublica.org/unemployment/

:-(