Excerpt (3 page article)
The longest U.S. recession since World War Two is exposing gaping holes in the social safety net, putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk of falling through.
Some 6.7 million jobs have been lost since the downturn began in December 2007, and the unemployed are at the mercy of a confusing and complicated patchwork of aid programs.
Many of the programs, such as unemployment benefits, are less generous than those available in Europe or Japan, reflecting deeply rooted American beliefs about who is deserving of help and what role government ought to play.
"Our safety net was always skimpy at best and it has frayed very substantially over the last 30 to 40 years, for reasons both ideological and financial," said Alex Keyssar, a Harvard University professor who studies unemployment and poverty.
Providing a solid safety net is certainly costly, although that argument looks a bit thin when the United States is committing trillions of dollars to ensure Wall Street has a soft landing. "Where's MY bailout?" has become a common complaint heard across the country.
Yet there has been little activity inside or outside of Washington aimed at shoring up the safety net, and Keyssar and other policy experts say the system urgently needs repair.
President Barack Obama's effort to patch one of the biggest holes -- ensuring health care even for those who lose their jobs -- has met fierce opposition, suggesting the chances for broader aid reform are slim.
Government figures released on Friday showed that the unemployment rate actually dipped to 9.4 percent in July from 9.5 percent in June, although many analysts attributed that to people giving up looking for work.
The ups and downs of the business cycle mean regular recessions, and with that, spikes in joblessness. But countries differ on how far a society's responsibility runs to those who get caught in the downdraft.
In the United States, the answer has long been limited public sector support -- in terms of both the size and duration of unemployment relief -- compared with Europe and Japan.
Keyssar sees that as a reflection of centuries-old American attitudes toward hard work, self-determination and the troubling concept of the "undeserving poor," or who is deemed worthy of public assistance.
"Linked to it all is a presumption or a suspicion, particularly on the part of conservatives, that people who are unemployed aren't really involuntarily jobless and shouldn't be supported," he said.
HELLO WORK
Those undercurrents are apparent in the way the U.S. benefit system was designed. Compared with other rich countries, U.S. benefits run out far more quickly and the eligibility rules are more rigorous. Much of that was done intentionally to discourage freeloaders.
The result is a hard-to-navigate and often insufficient set of programs which can be hard to qualify for and challenging to collect. According to the U.S. Labor Department, only 36 percent of unemployed people received benefits in 2008.
Many people who exhaust their weekly benefits simply fall through the cracks, said Edward Berkowitz, a public policy professor at George Washington University in Washington who studies U.S. social welfare.
Yap. Who cares if a few million Americans end up as street-people involuntarily? Just as long as "us" well-off Americans keep what's ours. We're Conservatives, we're "true" Christians, we're the GOP, we REALLY care.
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