Things are about to get much worse all at once for hard hit state economies. But I think there's a way to ease the impact...
I lost my internet connection yesterday, for reasons I don't care to discuss. So I packed up my laptop and my son and some Legos and drove to a resale kid's clothes store owned by my friend B. My plan, to mooch off B's wireless while my son played with B's daughters.
Apparently it was full Mooch Off of B day, because two other women sat in the back room talking quietly at a plastic table between sips from Styrofoam cups of B's coffee.
I also poured some coffee. I didn't feel so bad about the mooching. In fact, I saw my presence as more of a Service. My son would keep B's girls occupied for hours with only the occasional fight over whether they were playing House or playing Super Heroes. B stayed busy sorting through toddler clothes she bought from a woman in an aging mini van. I plugged my computer in and started working. Behind me the two middle aged women talked.
"So how is M's wife doing, anyway? That operation...how'd that go?"
"I guess she's feeling a lot better than she was. Staying home, though. She hasn't been around. I think she's been focusing on the kids for the summer. Her unemployment extension ends in November, so that's got M on edge."
"Mmmm...I still got mine until January. After that..." she shrugged.
"That's when my husband's ends. It's not that far off."
"Yeah. Heck. The summer just blew by. I don't think we hardly got a summer. My peppers aren't doing anything this year."
The conversation washed over me almost un-noticed for how common such conversations had become. But it silently crept back into my head and tumbled around for a bit until the women had left and the third cup of coffee started to kick in.
No fewer than three people in that conversation had been living off of unemployment benefits for the better part of a year. As Muskegon's unemployment hovers at about 20% or 1/5, the impact on the community has been buffered by Federal extensions to unemployment benefits.
And now, the unemployment benefits are about to run out. Thousands of citizens in my home town, within the space of a few months, are about to lose their final sources of income. Over a million citizens nationally are about to lose their final sources of income, also all at once.
[Nationally] Tens of thousands of workers have already used up their benefits, and the numbers are expected to soar in the months to come, reaching half a million by the end of September and 1.5 million by the end of the year, according to new projections by the National Employment Law Project, a private research group.
-- Article
While the news is peppered with bits of good news --
Cash for clunkers saved / created 42,000 jobs.
A shuttered Ford plant in Wixom, MI is being converted to produce battery based energy storage systems, and will employ 2,500 workers.
-- While the news is peppered with positive stories, the openings represent a drop in the bucket of the hundreds of thousands of job losses from Michigan's six year job loss streak. The unemployed look for jobs in earnest, but there is simply nothing available.
[Nationally] For every job that becomes available, about six people are looking, Dr. Katz said. “Unemployment insurance gives income to families who are really suffering and can’t find work even if they are hustling to look,” he said.
Some in congress are talking about yet another extension.
Here is what I would like to see happen:
In addition to another unemployment extension...I would like to see government business loans made available in places most private banks aren't willing to invest in - relatively small loans of $30,000 or $20,000. Because, news flash...banks aren't being very forthcoming with small business loans lately, especially in particularly economically depressed regions of the country.
People can't find jobs. Neither can people get the means to CREATE jobs.
Unemployment extensions are great for a region where jobs are likely to show up at some point in the near future. But there are regions, like Michigan, where that's just not going to happen. For those regions, investments in small entrepreneurs would actually make our future look brighter, and more self sustainable.