WASHINGTON (AP) — More than 1 million Americans are bracing for a harrowing, post-Christmas jolt as extended federal unemployment benefits come to a sudden halt this weekend, with potentially significant implications for the recovering U.S. economy. A tense political battle likely looms when Congress reconvenes in the new, midterm election year.
For families dependent on cash assistance, the end of the federal government’s “emergency unemployment compensation” will mean some difficult belt-tightening as enrollees lose their average monthly stipend of $1,166.
Jobless rates could drop, but analysts say the economy may suffer with less money for consumers to spend on everything from clothes to cars. Having let the “emergency” program expire as part of a budget deal, it’s unclear if Congress has the appetite to start it anew.
An estimated 1.3 million people will be cut off when the federally funded unemployment payments end Saturday.
Some 214,000 Californians will lose their payments, a figure expected to rise to more than a half-million by June, the Labor Department said. In the last 12 months, Californians received $4.5 billion in federal jobless benefits, much if plowed back into the local economy.
Ignore the perfunctory demurrals issued by Democrats, who showed their mettle when in a press conference Paul Ryan touted the new budget’s adherence to GOP principles while Patty Murray cooed about bipartisanship. If Obama and his party had wanted to make a fight of this, the public supports them. If they had emulated Tea Party tactics in the summer of 2009 over this holiday break — calling the GOP scrooges and underscoring how little the GOP cares about governance — their precious poll numbers might recover to pre-October 1 levels.
Humanizing The Vacuum 
Oh please! If, at this point, these people can survive on unemployment, they’d be better off financially by surrendering their obviously misplaced pride and taking whatever job that they can get…and there are actually plenty, though they all suck by most people’s inflated standards.
Perhaps even the Dems know this.
Yes, I know: hesitating before accepting a job 10 to $15,000 below your standards despite a college degree is an example of misplaced pride. God bless our system. Perhaps you even know this if you’ve been unemployed.
If you’ve been unemployed so long that you’ve finally run out of the massively extended subsidies, you don’t have the luxury of pride. Additionally, if after all this time, you’re actually surviving on employment, you’d do better, i.e., make more money, taking whatever job you could get.
And yes, after the “dot bomb” I was unemployed or temporarily and marginally employed for approx. 1 year.
Look, at some point this program must end, but our economy hasn’t recovered enough to justify its elimination (by the way unemployment benefits average about $300 a week). That’s why we kept earlier iterations of the program through the 1981-1982 and 1990-91 recessions and eliminated them after recovery looked more than robust.
The economy, employment-wise, has probably recovered as much as it’s going to, at least within a decade or so. At least, that’s my opinion which is based upon there being both a fundamental shift in business practices towards technology as opposed to manpower and the forced awakening from the illusion of the value of some jobs.
The various pushes by Democrats to increase wages and benefits, ObamaCare included, hasn’t helped any either. I’ll admit though that the push to raise minimum wage was a natural reaction to the fact that a different sort of employee is now common among those low-end jobs.