(Via the Rachel Maddow blog)
First-time claims for unemployment insurance benefits for the week ending Feb. 18
were a seasonally adjusted 351,000, unchanged from the previous week's upwardly revised figure of 351,000. (The original Department of Labor announcement last week set the number of first-time claims at 348,000.) The four-week moving average, which flattens volatility in the weekly numbers, fell 7,000 to 359,000. This marks the 14th week out of the past 16 that the claims numbers have been below 400,000, a sign of an improving labor market in the view of most analysts.
For the week ending Feb. 4, the number of Americans claiming benefits in all unemployment insurance programs, including the federal "emergency" extensions, totaled 7,502,791, a decrease of 178,619 from the previous week.
That total will shrink markedly over the next few months because of the congressional payroll tax-cut deal. That compromise reached last week and signed by President Obama this morning will reduce the number of weeks an out-of-work person can collect benefits in the 18 states with the highest jobless rates from 99 weeks to 73 weeks by September. In most states, the benefits will only last 63 weeks by then.
If Congress had failed to cut a deal, about a million people would have lost jobless benefits next month. The average worker receives less than $300 a week in benefits.
While the benefits numbers indicate improvement, 23.8 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed. For every four job seekers, there is on job opening. Some 43 percent of the nation's nearly 13 million officially unemployed American have been without work for more than six months, double the rate of any other recession since the 1930s.