House Could Extend Long-Term Unemployment Benefits, Maybe

Two million people are scheduled to lose their long-term unemployment benefits between now and year’s end. Unless friends or relatives elect to be generous, this would essentially make them indigent and likely without shelter.

The House Ways and Means Committee will take up the issue of extending the benefits, but it would be a fool’s bet to expect action from the lame duck Congress. It may be equally foolish to expect a Republican controlled Congress which will be seated in January to improve a plan that increases federal costs.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Sander M. Levin (D-MI) and Income Security and Family Support Subcommittee Chairman Jim McDermott (D-WA) today introduced the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Continuation Act. The legislation would extend Federal unemployment insurance programs for three months through February 28, 2011 preventing approximately two million unemployed workers from losing their benefits by the end of the year and over another two million by the end of February.

The proponents of the bill are not without ammunition:

In a report released today, the nonpartisan, independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that because UI benefits increase consumer demand and spending, while preventing people from falling out of the labor market, “the extensions of unemployment insurance benefits in the past few years increased both employment and participation in the labor force over what they would otherwise have been in 2009.”

Four million jobs would seem to be a huge number, but in the economic mood confirmed by the mid-term election, even what would appear to be critical assistance may go unheeded. And the matter of what will happen to all of these people and what burden they will put on other parts of the economy will go unasked, and unanswered.

Douglas A. McIntyre