Long-term jobless face frayed safety net
‘By February I will be ina tent,’ says one unemployed worker
Out of work, out of savings and out of things to sell, Carolyn Johansen is running out of options to keep her home even as her unemployment benefits run out.
“By February I will be in a tent,” said Johansen, from Fredericksburg, Va. “My big concerns are finding homes for my German shepherd Anna and my cat Tigra and a free place to store a thousand hardback and paperback books.”
For millions of out-of-work job seekers like Johansen, unemployment insurance is providing an increasingly tenuous financial lifeline.
With jobless benefits expiring for a record number of workers, some 7,000 a day, Congress is sending the president legislation to expand a popular homebuyers tax credit and extend unemployment benefits. The $24 billion economic package seeks both to propel a sluggish economic recovery and help out the millions who have lost jobs and have been unable to rejoin the workforce.
Under the measure, the $8,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers would be extended for seven months and expanded with a $6,500 credit for some prospective homebuyers who already own homes. The nearly 2 million people who have lost or are in danger of exhausting unemployment benefits before the end of the year would receive up to 20 weeks in additional benefits.
The measure comes as state unemployment insurance funds are running low, and tight budgets are fraying the safety net that jobless workers without benefits rely on.
After losing her job last October, Johansen figures she’s applied for over 300 jobs, but can’t find anything, not even seasonal work for the holidays. A single mom with a master’s degree and a career as a librarian, she applied for work at Blockbuster this week but couldn’t get an interview.
Johansen said she’s burned through her IRA and 401(k) savings and sold everything she could sell, including her jewelry. She applied for food stamps, but her $297 weekly jobless benefit, which expires Dec. 31, is $12 too high to let her qualify. She sent her teenage daughter to live with her older sister in Nevada; a disabled son who lives with her is scheduled to enter a residential treatment center in March.
Nearly two months after it was introduced in the House, the benefits extension has been delayed by debate over its cost and how to pay for it. Passage also has been complicated by added provisions that would extend tax credits for businesses and first-time home buyers.
As Congress has debated, weekly checks have run out for nearly 400,000 people. Friday’s looming employment report, expected to show another roughly 200,000 workers lost their jobs in October, has increased the political pressure on both parties to pass the measure.
“I just sent in my form requesting my last unemployment check,” Jim Schmitt, 58, of Apple Valley, Calif., said in an e-mail. “I have always voted Republican, and now I’m reading the Republicans are holding up the vote to extend the benefits. I might not be voting Republican again, even though the Democrats are no better.”
Continued at MSNBC
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