The Unemployment Benefits Stalemate: Our Broken Politics on Full Display

[Joanne98]

It's a terrible calamity that those in charge never should have allowed to happened, it's doing incalculable damage that will last for generations, and even as the destruction continues to spread, the government seems powerless to stop it.

No, I'm not talking about BP and the Gulf. I'm talking about President Obama, the millions of unemployed Americans, and the gulf between what needs to be done to deal with the jobs crisis and what is actually being done. It speaks volumes about our country and our deeply dysfunctional political system that not only have we been unable to bring the unemployment rate down, we can't even pass a bill extending unemployment benefits.

As the Huffington Post's Arthur Delaney points out, by the end of this week, Congress' failure to act will bring the total number of long-term unemployed prematurely cut off from aid to 2.5 million. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' June 2010 numbers, the unemployment rate is currently 9.5 percent. Almost half of those out of work have been looking for a job for over six months. What's more, the only reason the unemployment rate went down .2 percent in June is because over 650,000 people had become so discouraged they left the workforce altogether and are no longer being counted. Also not being counted are the underemployed -- those hoping for full-time work who've had to settle for part-time jobs. When you factor them in, you have nearly 26 million people who are unemployed or underemployed. And, over the next few months, upwards of 700,000 Census workers will be looking for a job, their services not required for another ten years.

And yet our system seems incapable of doing the obviously right thing. Yes, some of the hold-up in extending unemployment benefits has to do with the intricacies regarding the replacement of the late Senator Robert Byrd. But the fact that something so necessary to the well-being of the country has to come down to arcane Senate procedures is a gigantic warning sign of how seriously out of whack our nation's priorities have become.

The White House has the ultimate PR weapon -- the president's bully pulpit. But he seems unwilling to use it on this issue. Why isn't his administration doing everything possible to make it impossible for Congress not to pass the extension? If you'd told the members of Obama's team during their first week in office that, come the summer of 2010, unemployment benefits, which were routinely extended under President Bush, would be allowed to expire for over 40 days and counting, they -- to borrow a phrase from Richard Clarke -- would have been running around with their hair on fire. And rightly so. Yet does anybody see that kind of urgency coming out of the White House? Not just about extending unemployment benefits, but about creating jobs.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-unemployment-benefits_b_643717.html