this is when being unemployed stops being a 'vacation' and starts to turn serious ...
(snip)"Back in December, the qualification dates for existing tiers of unemployment benefits were extended for an additional two months. Time is up at the end of February.
Now another extension is needed or millions of workers will lose benefits over the next few months.
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).
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."(snip)
from
Obvious questions will be ...
- whether or not the US Congress will vote to yet again extend 'emergency unemployment benefit' coverage, despite the 100+ billion dollar additional annual cost / deeper gov't budget deficits.
- how will US states handle the additional costs of having the long term unemployed migrate from receiving unemployment checks to receiving welfare / medicaid / subsidized rent / subsidized utilities etc.
- how will US banks handle yet another rash of bankruptcies as long term unemployed homeowners give up on making even partial mortgage payments and long term unemployed credit card holders give up on making even minimum credit card payments.
- how will newly unemployed Americans react to being told they will only receive 26 weeks of state funded unemployment benefit checks when their earlier counterparts received an additional 34-53 weeks worth of federal unemployment checks on top of first receiving 26 weeks worth of state unemployment checks.
- how many long term unemployed Americans will finally be forced to move to different cities / states to find better job opportunties, or ( just as likely ) more generous social welfare benefits ?
Granted that no unemployed American trying to continue living on $20k-$25k per year in unemployment insurance income has really been enjoying a 'vacation'. However, that $20k-$25k per year in unemployment insurance income did allow a large number of unemployed Americans to avoid facing 'life changing' consequences and cling to a belief that 'things will return to the way they were'. And for better or worse, that $20k-$25k per year in unemployment insurance income also allowed the US gov't and the long term unemployed to avoid facing the issue that a large number of low skill Americans simply have no job prospects whatsoever for the forseeable future.
The 'gold foil hat' crowd will tell you that this is going to be a long, hot summer in more ways than one if the 'masking' effect of 'perpetual' unemployment insurance income for 5 million long term unemployed Americans falls by the wayside !
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