Reply #2: When you add this to the people losing unemployment, [View All]

[seasat]

it looks really bad. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently released a study that predicted that record number of people were due to lose their benifits the first 6 months of this year.


From CBPP study:

An estimated 390,000 unemployed workers will exhaust their regular benefits in January. About 15,000 of these workers live in states that qualify to provide additional weeks of unemployment benefits under a permanent, but extremely limited, federal/state program known as the Extended Benefits program. As a result, the number of unemployed workers who will exhaust their regular benefits in January without qualifying for further unemployment assistance is 375,000. As noted, this level of exhaustion would be higher than any other month on record.
...
The number of unemployed workers expected to exhaust their regular benefits in the first half of 2004 before finding work totals 2 million.<8>

An estimated 1.97 million unemployed workers thus are expected to exhaust their regular benefits without qualifying for further aid.

In no other six-month period on record have so many unemployed workers exhausted their regular benefits without qualifying for additional weeks of unemployment assistance. (Again, this finding remains true after adjusting for labor force growth.)

With this number of people being forced to find some sort of work, expect the wage growth to really lag. This could possibly hurt consumer spending the first of this year. The sad thing is there is over 20 billion in the trust fund for federal unemployment and they could extend it. Of course, it would require reimbursing some of those intergovernmental bonds and that would require withdrawal from the general revenue and there might be enough funds for an additional tax cut to one of Shrub's campaign donors.