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Posts Tagged ‘Catherine Curan’

The tragedy of the ‘long term’ unemployed

by Mojambo ( 106 Comments › )
Filed under Economy, Misery Index at May 24th, 2010 - 8:30 am

If you’ve got a job, hold on to it for dear life!  Do not take on debt, pay off your credit cards and hunker down because this is what neo-Socialism does to a nation,  it creates the ‘long term’ unemployed. The way to create jobs is to cut corporate income and payroll taxes but that seems to have escaped the notice of the geniuses in the White House. The key sentence in this article is “The “stimulus” has benefited primarily public workers, with state governments using the money to shore up things like education spending.”

by Catherine Curan

This week, the Senate is expected to extend jobless benefits to more than 5 million Americans through the end of the year. It is the sixth time in nearly two years that they’ve expanded or extended unemployment benefits — putting off, again, a day of reckoning our political leaders seem unwilling to face.

With the national unemployment rate at 9.9% — and 9.8% here in New York City — officials are afraid of what will happen to our cities, our welfare rolls and our struggling economy if these long-term unemployed are no longer given government assistance.

But we pay for this feint in other ways. The government shelled out $140 billion in unemployment benefits last year to an estimated 21 million people. That price tag is likely to increase this year.

This is no ordinary jobs crisis. Compared to other eras, our long-term unemployment numbers are staggering.

Back in the grimmest days of the 1980s recession, the share of those out of work for six months or more never rose above 26%. Today it stands at nearly half the roughly 10 million Americans seeking jobless benefits. In New York City, more than 145,000 are long-term unemployed.

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Read the rest:  Jobpocalypse now!