More Help for Unemployed

President Bush pointed to rising business investment and a higher stock market in his weekly radio address Saturday to proclaim that “tax relief has got this economy going again.” Maybe tax cuts have helped bolster the investment and finance end of the economy, but what about the 1.9 million workers who have remained jobless for more than six months and account for 22.3% of the official 8.4 million unemployed, not to mention the increasing toll of those who’ve stopped looking for work altogether?

Congress has abandoned these continued victims of a shrinking job pool. In late December, it allowed a temporary extension of 13 weeks of federally funded additional benefits to lapse. Congress should renew the extended jobless benefit immediately when it returns Tuesday.

The economy has lost 2.4 million jobs since March 2001, mainly because of the flight of manufacturing. Last month, the number of newly created jobs was down to a disastrous 1,000. The Labor Department says that only 66,000 jobs were created in the previous four months.

Treasury Secretary John W. Snow blames the lack of growth on rising productivity, but he and other officials have repeatedly said that tax cuts would quickly lead to big job growth.

Temporary extra benefits provide a vital cushion for families. A Congressional Budget Office study has shown that without them, more families would exhaust their assets and plunge into poverty. Once they’ve slipped into the ranks of the poor, it becomes that much harder for them to regain a good job. Nationally, about 100,000 workers a month are exhausting state benefits. In California alone, more than 200,000 lost their benefits from August to November.

Opponents of renewed benefits, like House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), say the recovery will take care of the unemployed. But a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study reports that, since World War II, the decline in the overall number of jobs this far into a recovery is unprecedented.

The cost of enacted tax cuts, sold to the public as an engine of job creation, is $272 billion. That’s more than 20 times the annual cost of temporary benefits, which tend to be spent right away, giving a faster kick to the economy. Instead of ignoring the lack of new jobs, the administration and Congress should acknowledge that the long-term unemployed continue to need help. Tax cuts haven’t benefited them, but a modicum of assistance will.