@reishka: Well see thats good you have some work experience. He doesnt really have much of that and im encouraging him to find an internship, but in the mean time, he needs to do something.

El_Fez I dont give fuck about you, no one was asking you to find a job or even talking about you. I am only talking about my brother. I am not saying there are not people out there who don't deserve an extension, but they are few and far between. Now stop reading my post and click over to www.monster.com.

Sorry if I care about my brother enough to know the Government dole is not actually helping him since he isnt even looking! If he was looking then I wouldnt give him such a hard time. Did I mention he didnt get layed off... he quit his last job...

Biggeek3 you dont know what you're talking about. I think this shows more care for my bro than anything else. Eventually people need to do shit for themselves instead of relying on other people to do shit for them. I hope you learn that before you have kids and you let them live with you till they're 40.

And I have applied for jobs making as little $12/hour, but I've been told by dozens of hiring managers that I'm "overqualified"!?!? So I dare anyone to say I'm not willing to take almost ANY job rather than depend on unemployment benefits! Furthermore, I've paid about $15k in taxes per year for the last decade, so I have no qualms about the government funding extended unemployment benefits for me and thousands in the same exact situation!!!

And if they really didn't need the money, how about they give back that $12 billion AIG gave them as well? I haven't seen them trying to refuse that check.

I made peace with the fact that if I cannot find two jobs to cover the one I lost (for which I receive UIA benefits) I will lose my home and vehicle. I do not qualify for COBRA. There will be no "safety net" of welfare or SNAP benefits either. I will have to live with relatives.

I don't receive that amount of UIA. I am not eligible for COBRA. I am not eligible for SNAP benefits.

Isn't that what the NDP and the PCs are working on right now? The NDP will back the government and stock the vote of non-confidence if and only if unemployment benefits are extended? I think it has to be for people who worked full time for a year consecutively, not sure on the amount.

At least, that's what my CBC news seems to tell me :)

If you haven't been out there in the job market lately trying to find something in a place with unemployment up near 10% you should pretty much shut your hole. You have no clue how tough it is out there. What it feels like to send out application after application day after day, month after month and not even have 99% of the places have the courtesy to at least reject you. It a real soul crushing experience looking for work right now. Its not about being lazy. Its about getting rejected for jobs that 2 years ago would have been begging for you to come work there. Its about taking better than 50% salary cuts just to have a chance to find anything.
Its all well and good to be righteous and say you'd take a grocery clerk job rather than make the same on unemployment, but totally different when that's your reality. The money still isn't enough to survive, and you won't have time to send out those hundreds of resumes and attend the interviews you need to.

The reason why some folks say that benefit extentions discourage job seeking is because some people will simply reduce their costs down to where unemployment pays for everything, then sit on their butts until the handout ends. And getting an extension is just enabling that undesired behavior.

Now granted not everyone is a dole-seeking slacker, but they do have to try to balance providing a safety net against preventing abuse.

you crazy.

But if there are states that pay 100% or close to it, then I could understand why some people would believe that benefit extensions would discourage people from looking for jobs. Because maybe somewhere they do. (other than among people who don't care how far into debt they fall)

canada needs to extend their benefits too.

we extended the benefits by 5 weeks in the spring, and people can get extensions if they are enrolled in approved training, but we really need to do more.

we currently offer between 22 and 50 weeks (variable by unemployment rate, crossed with the number of hours the claimant worked over the year prior).

the weekly benefit amount is 55% of the average weekly earnings, up to a maximum of $447. not high enough.

But it's a lot better than nothing, and four weeks is enough to cover my mortgage and car payment. Plus I've been lucky enough to find contract work to fill in the gaps (of course the unemployment doesn't come through in weeks where I'm paid), so I'm a lot better off than I could be.

I'd say I don't understand the people who just collect it and roll, but I think I do. I know people who don't look past today ...

What do you think the odds of that are?

Uncle Sam has displaced Sand Hill Road as the big VC on the block.

I was working in as a Tech in a Saturn dealership in September of last year. We can all see where that has led. Now I'm in school to become a Welder/Fabricator, only to be told that the lies I was fed by admissions are just that, lies. Just remember folks, college and trade school admissions people have quotas to fill and are willing to tell you any thing to fill them.

Schmuck.

and there are unemployed people out there who aren't eligible for unemployment because they never had jobs while in school, or the job couldn't be kept after graduation

1.) Stop unemployment benefits, some people will pick up whatever jobs they can find. For everyone else, it will mean a total cutback of everything, contributing to more economic problems.

2.) Keep giving payments to people, and they will have no desire to work, further adding to our ridiculous debt that is almost already impossible to be repaid.

We are in scary times, people. Unless we see an increase in jobs, we are completely and utterly f*cked.

Whoopdy-fucking-do for you, living in the magic land where you can just pluck a new job from the trees like so much fruit. Some of us people who have been looking for months now cant find shit.

So tell me, Magic Man, where the fuck do I find a job?

Jackass.

@The-Lone-Gunman: It's tied to unemployment rates, so I don't think there's a kool-aid factor.

@threadislocked: I didn't know they still made people like you. Yes, absolutely everyone who is on unemployment is because they're lazy.

You also know that almost all states index unemployment so that you can never get the same amount of unemployment as you made when you were working. If you made $10/hr, unemployment pays you the equivalent of $7.5/hr.

I also don't understand your logic of wanted to spread it to all of the US, if you're opposed to it in the first place.

Also if you work part time you get to keep 20-25% of your benefit, and any surplus over that gets used to extend your benefit (so if you make 70% of your benefit working half time, your benefit will roughly double in length)

@nybiker: Let me just say that I was not trying to make a blanket statement for everyone who is on unemployment.  Just my brother who is 23, still working on getting his bachelors and hasn't worked since November of last year.  There are plenty of jobs, retail etc at the very least he could do, but he is way to picky and believes this stuff is below him.  I keep telling him he needs to make getting his degree a priority and just work somewhere to make some money and get some kind of job experience.  But he seems content with cashing is gov check and spending on clubs, alochol and clothes.  His rent is low because he is renting a room from a relative.  So while he does have some incentive to get a job, its not much and its even less now.

@joeblevins: It varies depending on the state. New York is around $400 per week, Chicago is around $300 per week.

Curious to see if the ones who drank the Kool-aide are the ones getting stroked now.

TLG

This is not good. Some people have already been on unemployement for a year straight.
The only reason they do not get a job is because they will make the same as unemployement, but will have to spend 40 to 50 hours a week working.

There is going to be a time when they will have to take shitty jobs or move. There should be no reason why tax payers should delay that any longer.

Also to only do this in states with > 8.5% is bullshit, it should be in the entire United States of America.

Maybe not even that severe, but, maybe force all your competition to be terribly late to their interviews somehow. That would take a massive feat of engineering that one could respect.

+2

@IR1: Unless your brother has no expenses to speak of, he still has an incentive to get a job. I have a very big incentive to find a job as I've been out of work since Jan 2009 and am burning through my savings (like they always told us to maintain). New York State's unemployment rate ($405 per week) is not covering my mortgage (let alone the rest of my bills). And before anyone asks, I bought my house in Sept of 2000 and refi'd back in 2003 to a fixed 5.5%, 30-yr loan.

@WinterDog:
+1

How much does someone get from this benefit?

Great now my brother will have less of an incentive to get off his butt and go get a job.