Next time an extension of unemployment benefits comes up in the Senate, it probably won't come up. Previously, the opposition has come from some but not all Republicans. Now there is also Democratic opposition, according to Bloomberg, or rather, insufficient backing. Concern over the deficit, they say.
Those extended benefits, it should be noted, only apply to some of the unemployed, and only in some states. A large portion of jobless Americans are not eligible for any unemployment benefits at all, and more and more are seeing the benefits they were getting expire. There's a guy from Montana who essentially is saying "tough shit."
"You can’t go on forever," said Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, of Montana, whose panel oversees the benefits program. "I think 99 weeks is sufficient," he said.
"There’s just been no discussion to go beyond that," said Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat.
Well, at least they're not saying that the million or so out-of-work Americans who will lose their unemployment benefits in the next couple of months have become "hobos" or cable-TV layabouts as a consequence of drawing money from this New Deal program. But it's still small comfort for those such as Teauna Stephney mentioned in the Bloomberg story. She'll not only be jobless but also homeless if her benefits checks stop coming.
Among those politicians who are too sensitive to invoke the specter of hobos, there's still a widespread view that most jobless people so much enjoy living on benefits that they won't look for a job until the benefits go away. So, take the benefits away and, magically, everybody is employed again.
Then there is the real world.
In the real world, many states set maximum benefit levels below the family poverty line. In the real world, 15 million Americans are still out of work. In the real world, the situation is still grim. The chart below, from Business Insider, shows one reason why. Of the 50 states, 49 are showing less economic activity than a year ago.
Even though a plethora of signs - retail sales, manufacturing growth, haulage figures by truck and rail, consumer confidence - show the economy is improving, and may even be verging on a surge, most of those 15 million are still going to be out of work by year's end. And quite possibly by next year's end. And there's another 15 million underemployed and jobless not included in the headline statistics. Today's announcement of initial claims for unemployment benefits was not encouraging on this score. An improvement, but those statistics have been essentially flat for the past 18 weeks.
And while predictions for next week's report on job growth in April run as high as 300,000+, around 100,000 of those new jobs will be temporary hires by the Census. Getting back the 8.4 million jobs lost since December 2007 is going to take years, and since some of those jobs are gone for good, replacements will have to be found. As well as work for new entries in the job market as a result of population increase. Long-time structural unemployment (not to mention wage stagnation and wage arbitrage created in part by off-shoring of jobs) will have no easy fix.
Meanwhile, Senator Baucus to the contrary, the 75-year-old state-federal program of unemployment insurance is not even close to sufficient. If our elected officials want to avoid repeated extensions, there are solutions. The program needs to be updated and upgraded. It needs to be backed-stopped by a direct-hire government-funded jobs program. And it needs to cover everybody, not leave out a significant slice of Americans. The Danes have a good model. We don't need to copy them, but we surely should strive to emulate their results.