A record-high 375,000 jobless workers will exhaust their unemployment insurance this month and an estimated 2 million workers will find themselves in the same predicament during the first half of the year, according to an analysis of Labor Department statistics by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
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Congress voted in 2002 to give unemployed workers an additional 13 weeks of benefits and extended the program twice. But it expired just before Christmas. Congressional Republicans said another extension wasn't necessary because the economy was gaining strength and job growth was near at hand.
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The center's report said the 375,000 workers who will draw their last jobless check this month is the highest number for January in the three decades that the statistics have been tracked.
The expiration of jobless benefits "just before Christmas" reveals the moral quality of Republicans who wear their Christianity like a Halloween mask. "Trick and treat," they think to themselves as they redistribute all the candy from those who have less to those who have more.
Bush-haters must remember one thing: it's not just the boy emperor who deserves our wrath. He's just a pretzel-eating, nuclear-mispronouncing symptom. It's his whole party, their congressional toadies, and their ugly-is-pretty financiers that are the cancer.
Regarding that fiscal sucking sound, Nick Confessore at TAPPED makes a related point about Givers and Takers — and the candidates they supported.
