In a recent campaign speech to a group of businessmen, Rep. Zach Wamp said he wanted to stop granting extended unemployment benefits to laid off workers because he didn't like "creating a culture of dependence." He said he wanted workers "scraping and clawing and looking for work, not just sitting back waiting" for a good job to fall in their laps.
Here's the flip side: Nearly 45 percent of unemployed workers today - or around 5.3 million who now qualify for extended jobless benefits from the federal government - have gone without a job for at least 27 weeks. This is the first recession since World War II that more than 26 percent of workers have gone that long without finding a job.
That's a staggering statistic, one that best reflects the circumstances that have caused wide despair among both job-seekers and employed workers who remain cramped by static wages and mandatory furloughs.
The most recent economic analysis, moreover, suggests that employers will not be able anytime soon to hire enough new workers to reduce the 9.5 percent unemployment rate. In fact, first-time claims for jobless benefits inched up by 2,000 last week, to a seasonally adjusted average of 448,000, the most since February. First-time claims for unemployment benefits, which are followed from week to week and are seen as a signal of unemployment trends, have now risen three of the last four weeks.
Some of the recent new claims may be coming from Census workers who have recently been laid off from temporary decennial Census jobs. Excluding those expected losses, the net gain of new jobs amounted to a meager 12,000 positions, barely a ripple in the national context.
In any case, new weekly claims for benefits remain higher than is desirable. Though they peaked in March 2009 at 651,000, the number of claims had leveled out at around 450,000 this year. Economists say that figure needs to drop to 400,000 or under to reflect the rapid turnover of ordinary hiring and job changes in a healthy economy.
Recent jobless reports bear out what progressive economists have been preaching for months: the economy needs robust stimulus to jolt the economy out of a dishearteningly long slump. Ignoring that need will only make the economy, and the strain on federal budgets, longer and deeper.