Five Million Workers to Exhaust Unemployment Benefits by June

[ipaint]

The National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a new report last week showing that ...

1.2 million jobless workers will become ineligible for federal unemployment benefits in March unless Congress extends the unemployment safety net programs from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). By June, this number will swell to nearly 5 million unemployed workers nationally who will be left without any jobless benefits.
...
Currently, 5.6 million people are accessing one of the federal extensions (34-53 weeks of Emergency Unemployment Compensation; 13-20 weeks of Extended Benefits, a program normally funded 50 percent by the states).

Exhaust Unemployment Benefits This table shows the NELP's projections:

Of the almost 1.2 million workers facing a cut off of benefits in March alone:

# 380,000 workers will exhaust their 26 weeks of state benefits without accessing the temporary EUC extension program or the permanent federal program of Extended Benefits.

# Another 814,000 workers will not be eligible to continue receiving EUC past their current tier of benefits.

...According to the BLS, there are a record 6.31 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks (and still want a job). This is a record 4.1% of the civilian workforce. (note: records started in 1948).

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2010/02/five-million-workers-to-exhaust.html


Hundreds of millions of dollars will disappear from state economies. Jobs aren't coming back for years some say up to a decade. Are all these people just supposed to disappear.

[ipaint]

1. Mass Unemployment

"The government unemployment rate is deceptive on several levels. It doesn't count people who are "involuntary part-time workers," meaning workers who are working part-time but want to find full-time work. It also doesn't count "discouraged workers," meaning long-term unemployed people who have lost hope and don't consistently look for work. As time goes by, more and more people stop consistently looking for work and are discounted from the unemployment figure. For instance, in January, 1.1 million workers were eliminated from the unemployment total because they were "officially" labeled discouraged workers. So instead of the number rising, we will hear deceptive reports about unemployment leveling off.

On top of this, the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently discovered that 824,000 job losses were never accounted for due to a "modeling error" in their data. Even in their initial January data there appears to be a huge understating, with the newest report saying the economy lost 20,000 jobs. TrimTabs employment analysis, which has consistently provided more accurate data, "estimated that the U.S. economy shed 104,000 jobs in January."
When you factor in all these uncounted workers -- "involuntary part-time" and "discouraged workers" -- the unemployment rate rises from 9.7 percent to over 20 percent. In total, we now have over 30 million U.S. citizens who are unemployed or underemployed. The rarely cited "employment-participation" rate, which reveals the percentage of the population that is currently in the workforce, has now fallen to 64 percent.

Even based on the "official" unemployment rate, just to get back to the unemployment level of 4.6 percent that we had in 2007, we need to create over 10 million new jobs, and most every serious economist will tell you that these jobs are not coming back. In fact, we are still consistently shedding jobs, on just one day, January 27, several companies announced new cuts of more than 60,000 jobs.

Due to the length of this crisis already, millions of Americans are reaching a point where the unemployment benefits they have been living on are coming to an end. More workers have already been out of work longer than at any point since statistics have been recorded, with over six million now unemployed for over six months. A record 20 million Americans qualified for unemployment insurance benefits last year, causing 27 states to run out of funds, with seven more also expected to go into the red within the next few months. In total, 40 state programs are expected to go broke.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/145667/the_economic_elite_have_engineered_an_extraordinary_coup%2C_threatening_the_very_existence_of_the_middle_class

[lunatica]

2. Have we passed the point of no return?

When millions are unemployed and only thousands of low paying jobs are being created, it looks like this is a historic turning point. What comes next? Mad Max down the road a ways?

[ipaint]

4. The working class has been destroyed, it's onto the middle class.

It all depends on how much abuse those still relatively comfortable are willing to watch descend down upon their less fortunate fellow citizens.

[peacefreak]

3. I'm one of those people

and it's scaring the shit out of me.

[ipaint]

5. Me too.

And the fact congress dropped the ball on extending the EU program on time this month (which was necessary because they dropped the ball 3 months ago by extending for too short a time) I will probably end up living in my truck in a few weeks.

[NightWatcher]

6. Scarier yet, the states are running out (or have run out) of UI funds

and are having to borrow from the Fed