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Renewing Unemployment Insurance: A Moral, Economic Must
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To tackle our nation’s ongoing jobs crisis, the AFL-CIO has put forth a five-point plan to put people back to work and restore our economy. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka presented this five-part plan at the White House Jobs Summit last week.
The first step in this plan is to extend a lifeline to the people who have been hit the hardest by the jobs crisis. Under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, unemployment benefits were extended for millions of workers. Those who lost jobs got added food aid and assistance in getting COBRA health coverage. That was the right policy—but even as the crisis continues, those benefits are expiring.
Unless Congress acts now, supplemental unemployment benefits, additional food assistance and expansion of COBRA benefits will expire at the end of the year. When more than one in 10 people are out of work and millions more are underemployed, that’s unacceptable.
That means families who are hit by this jobs crisis are now at risk of bankruptcy, foreclosure and dire poverty. Extending these benefits won’t just keep families out of crisis. It will keep foreclosures from devastating neighborhoods and increase confidence and boost the consumer spending we need to keep our economy afloat.
Unemployed people who get this much-needed assistance can support businesses in their communities. Our economy can’t recover if the millions who are out of a job can’t put food on the table, stay in their homes and provide for their families.
Rudy Martinez, a heat and frost insulator from Minnesota who is out of work thanks to the slow economy, puts it well when he says he and his neighbors need help to be part of a strong economy:
I’m afraid to spend money because of how long I’m going to be laid off. Nobody wants to spend until they see something good happen.
This isn’t just an economic imperative—it’s a moral imperative. Too many children are coming to school hungry, hurting their academic achievement and their long-term success. Thousands of houses are foreclosed every day, robbing people of the time and money they’ve invested in their homes and communities. Without COBRA coverage, unemployed workers are at risk of medical bankruptcy.
With our economy struggling to recover from this crisis, we can’t afford to leave families behind. Let’s extend unemployment insurance, COBRA benefits and food aid to those who desperately need them.
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3 Comments
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Unemployment insurance is when you pay premiums as part of a group and then receive benefits, as needed. That is a good thing as it does help tide one over a difficult period while he seeks new employment. Almost unlimited extension of benefits as I read the AFLCIO’s position here turns into welfare. It actually pays people not to work, exacerbating his condition and our economic problems. It is an economic fact that you will always get more of what you subsidize. Not to mention further indebting our children.
In construction work, the unemployment Insurance has saved my family on a few occasions until the economy picked up. Since this is for working families who are laid off for no fault of their own and we have paid into it, it should be kept full bore until jobs are available.
Unemployment, both in the U.S. and the world as a whole, marches ever higher because the field of economics doesn’t account for the relationship between population density and per capita consumption.
Following the beating the field of economics took over the seeming failure of Malthus’ theory, economists adamantly refuse to ever again consider the effects of population growth. If they did, they might come to understand that once an optimum population density is breached, further over-crowding begins to erode per capita consumption and, consequently, per capita employment.
And these effects of an excessive population density are actually imported when a nation like the U.S. attempts to trade freely with other nations much more densely populated – nations like China, Japan, Germany, Korea and a host of others. The result is an automatic trade deficit and loss of jobs – tantamount to economic suicide.
Using 2006 data, an in-depth analysis reveals that, of our top twenty per capita trade deficits in manufactured goods (the trade deficit divided by the population of the country in question), eighteen are with nations much more densely populated than our own. Even more revealing, if the nations of the world are divided equally around the median population density, the U.S. had a trade surplus in manufactured goods of $17 billion with the half of nations below the median population density. With the half above the median, we had a $480 billion deficit!
If you‘re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, then I invite you to visit either of my web sites at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in the blog discussion and, of course, buy the book if you like. (It’s also available at Amazon.com.)
Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”