If Scott Walker wanted to blame someone else for his poor job creation numbers, besides protesters and recall elections, he can just point to his old friend Reince Priebus at the RNC. Republicans are finally taking down unemployment insurance, in their effort to create a more desperate low wage workforce. This is their moment. What's next, ending the five day work week? Here's the economic hit to Wisconsin:
23,700 Wisconsinites lost unemployment insurance Dec. 28th. With an average weekly check of $266.09, Wisconsin lost $6,306,333 in just one week, money that could have gone in to each local economy. This is according to the US Dept. of Labor/Office of Unemployment Insurance.What's rarely mentioned is how the unemployed are require to look for work in order to receive their benefits. Cutting off benefits will only be an incentive for some to stop looking. That's a plan?
The House Ways and Means Committee/Democrats has an interactive map showing the negative effects of not extending unemployment insurance benefits in each state. You won't find this map on the Ways and Means Committee/Republicans site. Gee, you think they don't want their low information voters to know the truth?
For Wisconsin, already struggling to hold onto jobs all the while trailing the rest of the country in job creation, Scott Walker can only sit back and watch his own party sabotage his reelection efforts. Below is a screen capture of Wisconsin:
The Dec. 28 expiration of the emergency federal program cut off more than 1.3 million Americans from unemployment insurance, with an additional 72,000 Americans losing their benefits each week during the first half of 2014, on average. Without the federal EUC program, state UI programs nationwide provided assistance to only 25 percent of the unemployed. Since records began, going all of the way back to 1946, the annual UI recipiency rate has never dropped below 30 percent (when accounting for both state and federal benefits.
Sources: Committee on Ways and Means Democrats, “Millions of Unemployed Americans Will Lose Benefits Unless Congress Acts,” (2013) PDF & The Council of Economic Advisers and the Department of Labor, “The Economic Benefits of Extending Unemployment Insurance” (2013) PDF
What no one ever mentions is that for Scott Walker, this is great news. When huge numbers of people loss their UI Benefits, the unemployment rate drops...in Wisconsin that means 23,700 are "technically" no longer unemployed as they are no longer counted.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't quite work that way, Tess. The unemployment rate is based on a telephone survey asking if people are looking for work, and if they are/are not working. It also wouldn't be listed on NEW unemployment claims.
ReplyDeleteWhere you'd see this stat show up would be on the continuing unemployment claims (they'd cut people off) and in lower economic activity from people who won't be spending as much. Don't get me wrong, this is a bad thing that will hurt people, but it won't affect the big-name stats as much and help Walker from that perspective.
100 million people no longer included in the labor participation rate. How else do you guys think they got the headline unemployment number down to 7%?
ReplyDeleteThere never has been and never will be a recovery until all the banks fail and all the debt is washed out of the system.
Don't expect the same people (democrats AND republicans) who caused this mess to be the ones to solve it.