Source: Detroit News

Washington— The White House and House Democrats are making a last-ditch effort to extend emergency unemployment benefits, warning that without action 4.9 million people — including 189,700 in Michigan — will lose benefits by the end of next year.

The program is set to expire on Dec. 28, and 1.3 million people — including 44,000 in Michigan — would immediately lose benefits. Without an extension, the White House says next year another 3.6 million people, including 145,000 in Michigan, would lose benefits.

House and Senate Democrats have proposed a $25 billion, one-year-extension of the program. Rep. Sander Levin, D-Royal Oak, said Thursday that “in human and economic terms, this Congress has a mandate to extend federal unemployment insurance.”

They note that in prior recessions, emergency unemployment — beyond the standard benefits offered by states — has never been ended when the jobless rate remained so high. And it has never been abruptly cut off — but rather phased out. Levin noted that “finding work remains very difficult in an economy that still has 1.5 million fewer jobs than before the recession started six years ago.”

Betsey Stevenson, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers and University of Michigan economist, told reporters on a conference call that the long-time unemployment rate is 2.6 percent — more than double “any other time that we have allowed benefits” to end.

Republicans have shown little interest in extending the benefits. House Speaker John Boehner told reporters that if President Obama has a plan to extend benefits “I’d truly entertain a look at it.” But he said Obama’s focus “ought to be creating a better environment for our economy and creating more jobs.”

In a new report citing the Congressional Budget Office and JPMorgan, the White House estimates that failing to extend benefits could reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by 0.2 to 0.4 percentage points. Because unemployment benefits are typically quickly spent, they provide significant economic stimulus.

“Without an extension, the Council of Economic Advisers estimates that the economy will generate 240,000 fewer jobs by the end of 2014,” including 8,450 in Michigan, the report said.

Levin also cited the jobs impact on ending emergency unemployment. “For this Congress to ignore the national economic impact would be shortsighted. To ignore the individual human impact would be coldhearted,” he said.

Allowing emergency benefits “to expire would be harmful to millions of workers and their families, counterproductive to the economic recovery, and unprecedented in the context of previous extensions to earlier unemployment insurance programs … the unemployment rate is unacceptably high at 7.3 percent, and far too many families are still struggling to regain the foothold they had prior to the crisis,” the report said

The White House said in the report that 960,000 people in Michigan have received emergency unemployment benefits since 2008, among the 23.9 million people nationally that have had access to the program.

States with the highest unemployment rates — such as Michigan — were eligible to grant workers up to 99 weeks of benefits between state and federal programs. Currently, Michigan unemployed workers are eligible for about 55 weeks of total unemployment benefits.

Including children and other household members, 69 million people have benefited from emergency unemployment since 2008.

Michigan’s unemployment rate has been at 9 percent for the past three months — and is 1.7 percentage points above the national 7.3 percent.

Metro Detroit still remains hard hit. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn metro division was one of just two of the nation’s largest 32 metro areas to lose jobs in October 2013 over 2012, shedding 1,800 jobs, or 0.2 percent. Gary, Ind., was the only other area to lose jobs. By contrast, the Warren-Troy-Farmington Hills division added 21,100 jobs, up 1.9 percent

The unemployment rate in Wayne County remains at 10.1 percent, while in Oakland and Macomb counties it is 8.3 percent.

Many Republicans have called on Congress to let emergency benefits expire.

The Emergency Unemployment Compensation program has been in place since 2008, about a year after the recession began. The number of weeks of federal benefits has been substantially reduced during the last two years.

Since 2008, 24 million people have received $252 billion in emergency benefits, according to a GOP study released in October.

The report said the program, “which has already added too much to the deficit, and helped keep unemployment too high for too long — should be allowed to finally come to an end.”