It seems logical that the longer that people are unemployed the worse their financial situations become. Some people are out of money within a few weeks of losing a job because they had no savings. But, the trouble is worse among people who have been jobless for months or even years.
A new Gallup survey shows that “About one in four unemployed adults in the United States today, 26%, reports they are either falling behind on their bills or facing more serious financial difficulties such as bankruptcy or foreclosure. This compares with 21% of underemployed Americans and 8% of adults who are neither unemployed nor underemployed.”
The problem is most acute among Americans who are ages 30 to 49. They are likely to have children and mortgages, each of which requires significant incomes to support
This brings the debate about how the jobless should be supported back to center stage. People without money are not consumers. People who default on mortgages drive down home prices. People who go bankrupt hurt the earnings of credit card companies and automakers among others. Unemployment benefits may mitigate some of these troubles, but the federal government cannot afford to support millions of jobless people even if Congress and the President think it is a good idea. The fight against a rising deficit is nearly violent already. There is almost no support to extend an unemployment safety net beyond its current limit.
It is pessimistic to say that the jobless problem and the awful by-products of homelessness and financial ruin will not be effectively addressed anytime soon if they are addressed at all. This means that some portion of the population, certainly into the millions, will not completely recover from the effects of the recession at all. The intransigence of the issue has come to that.
Methodology: Unemployed and underemployed results are based on telephone interviews conducted as part of Gallup Daily tracking from Dec. 21, 2010-Jan. 9, 2011, with a random sample of 15,120 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, selected using random-digit-dial sampling.
Douglas A. McIntyre
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