A Happy New Year to You and Two Million Jobless Workers

Before I knew Jesse, I thought that New Year’s Day was mainly for recovering from hangovers — and for making resolutions. Nothing like a headache to make you resolve to lead a better life.

Now I know the day is also for eating greens (for money), black-eyed peas (for luck), some sort of pork (we’re not sure for what, though I’ve read it represents progress) and cornbread (for nothing, so far as I know, except that it goes well with the mandatory dishes).

I’ve made the usual resolutions — eat less, exercise more, etc. For the blog, I’ve resolved not to be so persistently gloomy and angry. Surely there’s some unequivocally good news to impart, even in these troublesome days.

I know from past experience that the new leaves I vow to turn over usually wilt before the crocuses sprout. But it’s surprisingly easy to begin the new year with a cheerful post.

Because more than two million jobless workers who were about to lose their unemployment insurance benefits will get them after all, thanks to the last-minute, barebones bill Congress passed to pull us back from the so-called fiscal cliff.

The workers, as you probably know, are those who’ve been actively looking for new jobs for more than 26 weeks — the period that most regular state UI programs will cover.

They’ve been getting federally-funded benefits under the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program that was originally part of the Recovery Act.

The last extension of the program kept it alive, though in shrunken form, through December.

So all those jobless workers faced a hard cut-off of their EUC benefits — this at a time when there are still more than three job seekers for every job available.

Another million or so workers would have had no UI benefits by April — and by the end of the year, about three-quarters of all jobless workers.

The belated, but welcome action by Congress will be good not only for many of these workers, but for our slowly recovering economy, which will surely need all the help it can get in the months to come.

As go-to economist Mark Zandi has testified, extending UI benefits will deliver a bigger bang-for-the-buck boost to the economy than virtually any other measure in the stimulus arsenal.

The Congressional Budget Office recently reported that the spending will save and/or create 300,000 jobs — or looked at another way, that 300,000 jobs would have been lost if Congress had refused to invest in EUC benefits.

But economists didn’t save the EUC program. We’ve got to give the President credit for insisting on the extension.

More credit, I think, is due to the advocacy organizations that kept the issue on the front burner — and to 134,000 of us in the grassroots who joined the effort.

This in itself is good news because it tends to suggest our voices matter — and, of course, in some cases our votes.

Worth recalling in the months ahead because we who care about poor, near-poor and about-to-be-poor people have our work cut out for us.

UPDATE: I should also have acknowledged the majority of Democrats in the Senate and the House Democrats who urged their colleagues to extend the UI benefits.

Census Poverty Rates Defy Predictions

Well, the crystal ball gazers blew it. The Census Bureau just reported that the poverty rate didn’t rise last year. The official 15% rate isn’t statistically different from the 2010 rate, it says.

This is surely good news. It nevertheless means that more than 46.2 million people were so poor as to fall below the Bureau’s very low poverty thresholds.

And well over 20.3 million — 6.6% — were so extremely poor as to fall below 50% of the applicable threshold. This is what’s commonly referred to as severe poverty.

What also hasn’t changed is the distribution of poverty across different age and race/ethnicity groups. For example, in 2011:

• The child poverty rate was 21.9% — not statistically different from the rate in 2010.
• The poverty rate for seniors was 8.7% — again, virtually the same as the 2010 rate.
• The black poverty rate was nearly triple the poverty rate for whites — 27.6%, as compared to 9.8%.
• The poverty rate for Hispanics was 25.3%.

Poverty rates among family types also replicate a familiar pattern. The percent of married couples who were officially poor was 6.2%, while the rate for single-woman households was five times higher — 31.2%.

Severe poverty rates were, of course, lower. But they mirror the same disparities. For example:

• Nearly 1 in 10 of America’s children — 9.8% — lived in severe poverty last year.
• The severe poverty rate for blacks was 12.8% and for Hispanics, 10.5%.
• By contrast, severe poverty afflicted 4.4% of whites and only 2.3% of seniors of all racial/ethnic groups combined.

What we’re to make of all this I’m really not sure. We’ll undoubtedly have many analyses in days to come.

In the interim, we can ferret out of the Census report a couple of policy-relevant messages, based on examples it provides of what the statistically adept can find out by using its online tool.

One we might guess from the relatively low senior poverty rate. Without Social Security benefits, about five times as many elderly people would have been counted as poor.

This is surely a testimony to one of our oldest anti-poverty programs — and a warning of what could happen if some of the “reforms” that are being widely promoted became law.

An additional 2.3 million people were lifted above the poverty threshold by unemployment insurance benefits.

A more imminent danger here because more than 2 million jobless workers will lose these benefits in January if Congress doesn’t extend the only still operative federally-funded UI program.

Millions more will have, at most, 26 weeks of benefits — this at a time when 40% of those actively looking for work have been unemployed for longer.

So here’s a case where our federal policymakers could keep what are still really depressing poverty numbers from getting worse.

Whether they will or not depends on what voters decide in November.

Extending Unemployment Benefits Won’t Help All Jobless Workers

Looking back on my post about the expiring federal unemployment insurance benefits, I realized I’d left out important parts of the picture.

One is the growing number of workers who’ve been jobless more than 99 weeks — longer than the maximum for benefits even when both federal programs were in full force.

The other is that lots of workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own can’t get UI benefits at all.

In 2010, for example, only 44% of these workers got any benefits from their state programs, according to a recent brief from the Urban Institute.

The brief documents what we probably would have guessed. A very high percentage of the left-out workers are “disadvantaged,” e.g., blacks and Hispanics, single mothers, teens and young adults.

Both blacks and Hispanics are also unusually likely to be among the long-term unemployed, another Institute brief tells us.

We know from other sources that single mothers were far more likely to be jobless and actively looking for work last year than married mothers — or the labor force as a whole. This was also true for the 16-24 year old age group.

The disadvantaged workers are less likely than others to get UI benefits because states have eligibility rules that tend to exclude them.

These, in some cases, are related to the workers’ disadvantages in the labor market.

Virtually all states, for example, have minimum earnings requirements. The time period they use varies, but the earnings threshold will always disadvantage low-wage workers whose jobs weren’t ongoing and full-time.

Workers who got jobs through temporary agencies are often out of luck — even if they put in a full day, every day.

Only 22 states will provide benefits for workers who have to quit for reasons most of us would find compelling, i.e., domestic violence, the need to care for a sick or disabled family member.*

Not surprisingly, single mothers seem to fall into this group, though the Institute’s report isn’t altogether clear on this.

Many are also left out in the 23 states that won’t provide benefits for workers who are looking for a new job that isn’t full time. We know anecdotally that single mothers may have no alternative because they can’t afford the high costs of child care.

The Recovery Act gave states a financial incentive to eliminate such barriers in their UI programs.

Thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia adopted the first and only partial payment option — or already had it on the books.

But only 34 states and the District took the minimum three actions that netted them the full amount they could receive.

Just one and the District went for the fully battery. Still barriers for disadvantaged workers in both jurisdictions, however.

Some states have since tightened up their requirements — this rather than raise the imprudently low UI taxes they’d decided to collect from employers.

The end result is a patchwork of coverage.

But there are only five states in which more than half of all jobless workers got UI benefits in 2010. And only one — Alaska — where the rate topped 60%.

* Eleven other states will provide benefits for workers who quit because of domestic violence, but not because of a family member’s illness or disability.

The Fiscal Cliff No One Is Talking About

Well, not no one. But no one with the political clout — and determination — to keep many millions of Americans from falling off a cliff.

And it really is a fiscal cliff — unlike the convergence of action-forcing events that everyone is talking about, i.e., the expiration of the Bush tax cuts and the onset of the across-the-board spending cuts triggered by the Super Committee’s failure to agree on a more sensible way to reduce the deficit.

In late December, the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program will expire, unless Congress extends it.

This, recall, is one of two federal programs that provide benefits for a limited period of time after jobless workers have collected as many weeks of benefits as their regular state programs allow — generally 26 weeks, though fewer in some states now.

Congress has already retrenched both programs.

As a result, the Extended Benefits program — the last phase in the benefits sequence — will shut down by mid-August because the law funds benefits only in states where unemployment rates are higher than they were in the recent past.

That leaves the EUC program. It’s already shrinking, such that jobless workers will soon get, at most, 73 weeks of benefits, counting the 26 most states offer.

The latest state-level unemployment figures suggest that benefits will end sooner in all but seven states and the District of Columbia.

But as things stand now, workers who lose their jobs this month will be on their own if they don’t find work before their state benefits end because the EUC program won’t be there for them.

Nor for workers who’ve already been jobless long to be getting EUC benefits. They’ll face what the National Employment Law Project calls “a hard cut-off.”

Hard indeed, especially when we see that nearly 5.2 million jobless workers have been actively looking for employment for more than 27 weeks — many for much longer.

Those who find work at all look, on average, for about 40 weeks, according to NELP. No wonder when there three and a half times as many job seekers as job openings.

The Congressional Budget Office expects the nationwide unemployment rate to remain over 8% through 2013. Congress has never let federally-funded unemployment benefits expire when the rate was this high.

But it’s a new day on Capitol Hill. Senator Max Baucus, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, says the issue isn’t on the radar screen — yet. Not a peep from his counterpart in the House, Congressman Dave Camp.

And President Obama doesn’t seem to be jawboning the issue, though he played a key role in getting the benefits extended last time the Bush tax cuts were due to expire.

This may just be a replay of the last two extensions. Wait till the last minute before enacting some sort of save.

A good strategy for Republicans, who had the leverage to scale back EUC — and for all we know, may have another cutback up their sleeve.

But I wouldn’t bet on it. The price tag of the last extension was about $30.1 billion over 10 years. Another extension would presumably cost less because it wouldn’t have to include funding for the EB program, even for part of the year.

But Congress — and the President — are anxious to come up with a way to halt the across-the-board cuts and still hit the agreed-on deficit reduction target.

They’re for sure going to extend the Bush tax cuts — though when and for whom remains to be seen. Many economists believe they should — at least for all but the wealthiest 2% — because a broad-based tax spike now could set back our sluggish economy recovery.

But the tax cuts will increase the deficit — unless they’re offset by deeper spending cuts or a revenue-raising overhaul of the tax code, i.e., a massive clean-out of the deductions, credits and the like.

I’ve got a hard time seeing Democrats and Republicans come together on the “grand bargain” we’re told could emerge. But ultimately they’ll agree on something.

With all the complex, divisive priorities in play, it’s not hard to imagine the EUC program falling by the wayside.

Party leader will say the answer is more job creation. Jobless workers would no doubt agree.

But in the meantime, those who’ve been looking hard and finding nothing could fall off a cliff and into poverty — if they’re not there already.