I was talking to a friend today who's moving with his wife and kid to his father-in-law's house -- which is already in foreclosure. "What if the sheriff comes and changes the locks while you're gone?" I said.
"Then I guess we have to move," he said. "At least we can save a couple of months' rent, if we're lucky."
He lost his job a couple of months after I lost mine, and his unemployment ran out, too. Unlike me, he has a masters degree, and school loans. Fortunately for them, his wife's still employed. One of her relatives just offered them a car, but they don't have the $75 to change the title.
And the thing is, they're not at all unusual. So why are the Republican Lords and Ladies of the Senate so blithely ignoring the plight of the unemployed? How can they be so indifferent, or so uninformed? Not only are they refusing to help them by extending unemployment benefits, holding them hostage to get yet another massive tax break for the rich, they also insult them by accusing them of being too lazy to work. Shame on them! Oh, I forgot -- they have no shame.
If the Democrats had any spine at all, they'd let the tax cuts expire and let the Republicans deal with the fallout:
Marie Roth said she fell behind on house payments when Congress spent nearly two months dithering over a reauthorization of extended unemployment benefits last summer. Now that lawmakers are dithering again, she's worried she'll lose the house.
"I'm trying not to freak out. Just kinda praying and hoping for the best," Roth, 40, told HuffPost. "I keep looking for work and it's just not happening. There's nothing there."
Roth said she'd worked all her life when she lost her job as a property manager in June 2009, two months after the birth of her daughter, Alannah, and three months after she bought a home in Hemet, Calif.
She said she's currently receiving unemployment benefits under the fourth "tier" of the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program created by Congress in 2009 to fight the worst recession since the Great Depression. She said her tier ends right before Christmas, and if Congress doesn't act, she'll be ineligible for the 20 weeks of benefits available in California under the federally-funded Extended Benefits program, which picks up where EUC leaves off. Together the programs provide up to 73 weeks of benefits on top of 26 weeks of state benefits.
Both programs lapsed on Wednesday because Congress has not reauthorized them. The Labor Department estimates that 800,000 people will be dropped from EB within a week, and another 1.2 million will be dropped from EUC by the end of the month (though people on EUC, like Roth, will get to finish benefits in their current tier).
Over the summer, Roth was one of 2.5 million people who had their benefits interrupted while the Senate wrangled over the reauthorization. One Democratic senator told HuffPost Tuesday that another lengthy lapse is entirely possible. "We're used to having a series of votes on this before we get it done," Sen. Robert Casey (D-Pa.) said.
Roth is used to it, too. She thinks Congress is oblivious to the havoc it creates for people laid off through no fault of her own such as herself. "I think they understand but they just don't care," she said. "They care more about the issues that affect them, like the Bush tax cuts."
