Afghanistan: What do the jobless do when the benefits end? --- The end to federal jobless benefits for nearly 2 million people has sparked a bitter debate in Congress about whether Washington is abandoning desperate households or simply protecting strained government coffers. -- It is also providing real-time answers to a question economists have long pondered: How do people survive when they suddenly have no money coming in? --- Studies show that about a third of the people cut off from long-term unemployment benefits will find help from Social Security or other government programs. Others will cobble together dwindling savings or support from family. But most baffling to economists are the people who appear to come up with more-idiosyncratic solutions, which are tough to identify and almost impossible to track. --- Never in more than 65 years have so many workers been without a job and without a government lifeline. Congress cut off 1 million people en masse in December when it permitted a special emergency program for the long-term unemployed to lapse. Since then, their ranks have been growing by about 72,000 a week, according to the National Employment Law Project (NELP), which lobbies on behalf of the jobless. --- On Tuesday, in testimony before Congress, Federal Reserve Chair Janet L. Yellen highlighted long-term unemployment as one of the central challenges of the U.S. economic recovery. Not only is it a sign that the labor market is still weak, she said, but it also shows that economic growth is falling far short of its potential. --- Someone who loses a job typically receives unemployment benefits from the state for 26 weeks. During the recession, however, the number of people who remained out of work swelled, and Congress voted in 2008 to provide additional aid that made checks available for as long as 99 weeks in the hardest-hit states. -- Last year, lawmakers cut the maximum benefit to 73 weeks. Then, at the end of December, Congress let federal aid lapse altogether. -- Mitchell Hirsch of NELP said people were “thrust essentially overnight from a situation where they were struggling to make ends meet with their benefits into one where they’re now struggling just to survive.” Six weeks later, he said, “what we’re hearing . . . is increasingly desperate.” --- According to a 2012 report by the Government Accountability Office, Social Security is the government program people turn to most often after exhausting unemployment benefits. But the share who do so is relatively small, just 18 percent. An additional 6 percent apply for disability insurance, and just 3 percent use government aid designed for families and children. --- “Some members of Congress are just in complete denial about the severity of the economic downturn,” said the Rev. Larry Snyder, president of Catholic Charities USA, which has seen demand for food and other forms of aid jump since federal benefits lapsed. -- “Some people are interpreting the fact that we’re seeing signs of economic recovery as saying, ‘Okay, folks are all right,’ ” Snyder said. “That’s just not true.” - More, Ylan Q. Mui, Washingtonpost, at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/what-do-the-jobless-do-when-the-benefits-end/2014/02/11/e135d74a-8eb7-11e3-b227-12a45d109e03