The real party of NO, the GOP, steps it up

[Riot]

Unemployment checks help positively drive the economy. Applicable excerpts:

Even as Congress debates whether to extend emergency unemployment checks for more than 6 million Americans who are approaching the 99-week-limit, some four million others are facing the certain end of their benefits over the next year, unless an entirely new program is crafted.

This is the sobering conclusion of a report released by the President's Council of Economic Advisers on Thursday. The study forecast that the exhaustion of unemployment benefits for so many will curb spending power enough to significantly impede an already weak economic recovery.

Without an agreement to extend the program, the economy will lose about 600,000 jobs, as the spending enabled by continued unemployment checks ceases.

National economic output--which expanded at an annual pace of 2.5 percent during the summer months--would fall off by 0.6 percent.

That disturbing prospect does not even account for the roughly four million people who would exceed even the extended limits in the emergency program. Were that many jobless people left to fend themselves without unemployment checks, that would pose significant risks for the broader economy, say economists. They cite the fact that consumer spending accounts for roughly 70 percent of all economic activity.

"If you're looking for economic recovery supported by consumers, it's discouraging," said Henry J. Aaron, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a research institution in Washington. "It's drag on the economy."

Many economists argue that paying unemployment benefits is among the most effective ways the government can spur the economy: Jobless people tend to spend nearly all of their unemployment checks, distributing those dollars throughout the economy.

"There's very few things we can spend money on that probably have such an immediate impact on household consumption as unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed," said Gary Burtless, a former Labor Department economist and now a fellow at Broookings.

More than 6.3 million workers were out of a job for at least 27 weeks in November, comprising nearly 42 percent of all unemployed Americans, according to Labor Department data released Friday.

The Federal Reserve forecasts that the unemployment rate will still be as high as 9 percent this time next year, and about 8 percent at the end of 2012, according to minutes from the central bank's Federal Open Market Committee meeting last month.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/1..._n_791682.html