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Two full months have passed since almost 1.3 million long-term unemployed Americans lost their extended government benefits, a number that has since jumped by 576,000.
Now we're up to
2 million people. In
two months. How high/low can we go? At this rate the number of long-term unemployed by Election Day will be over
5 million, by my simplistic math. That's including roughly 200,000 people who lost their unemployment benefits while America was busy cheering our Olympic team in Russia.
Anyone care to correct my math? The number of long term unemployed is increasing at a rate of 70,000 per week, while denial of their benefits drained the US Economy of an estimated 3 Billion dollars throughout January and February.
The crisis has grown so stark that even conservatives at well-heeled think tanks are acknowledging the problem their ideological brethren in the Republican Party have caused by pursuing their malevolent program of blocking emergency compensation for these millions of Americans:
Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute urged Congress to push through the extended benefits.
“A falling unemployment rate is good if the unemployed are transitioning into employment,” Strain told PBS last month. A falling unemployment rate is not good if the unemployed are losing hope and giving up their job search entirely.
What's it like for these people? How are they faring? How are their kids? Not very well, it seems. One psychologist who spends more time than she expected counseling the long-term unemployed puts it this way:
While many of her clients proved resilient in bouncing back and "reinventing" themselves, others had a far more difficult time and tended to become panicky, "very depressed," and "angry victims." For those who suffered the double trauma of losing their jobs and then no longer being able to support themselves and their families, "That really slams your self-esteem," she said in an interview on Thursday.
"It's one thing to lose a job, but it's another not to be able to manage," she said.
The human impact of chronic unemployment goes well beyond losing self-esteem. The problem has grown to be such an integral facet of American life that they're now doing
studies:
One in two of the respondents in the two-year national study said they began avoiding friends and associates out of a sense of shame and embarrassment — a self-imposed isolation that hurt their ability to network to find work.
"Because of the persistence of high levels of long term unemployment there are millions of people who are suffering from mental health problems and many of them are going untreated by professionals," Carl Van Horn, a professor of public policy and economics at Rutgers and head of the Heldrich Center, said this week.
"Losing a job is more than just a financial crisis for people," Van Horn says. "It creates numerous other damage: stress, anxiety, substance abuse, fights, and conflicts in the family and feelings of embarrassment and depression."
The effects of being unemployed for years on end are now being characterized as a "silent mental health epidemic:"
The mental health crisis among the long term unemployed rarely gets much attention, although Van Horn has described the combination of long-term unemployment and diminished government support as "a silent mental health epidemic."
Long-term unemployment frequently causes depression, drug and alcohol abuses, spousal abuse, divorce, and even suicide. Many of these unemployed Americans couldn't afford to seek professional help because they lost their employer-provided health care insurance when they were laid off. At the same time, federal, state, and local governments cut back on spending for mental health clinics and outreach in response to budget crises spawned by the bad economy.
Thus far, 2.3 million children in this country have been adversely impacted by the fact that their parents can't find work. It affects not only their health but also--rather obviously, you would think--their academic performance in school. One of the few areas of solace for their parents is the Affordable Care Act, as many of the victims of this sordid Republican ideological experiment are now able to secure health care under Medicaid or the ACA.
Meanwhile the GOP's excuse is that they would just love to extend benefits to the long-term unemployed if only some equal cuts could be made in government spending, in the name of deficit reduction. This conveniently ignores the fact that the Federal budget deficit dropped more last year than in any year since World War II. Corporate profits this year, on the other hand, have soared to all-time highs.
It isn't the "deficit" that's driving the Republican Party's behavior towards the American people.
It's pure indifference.