Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has vowed to prevent the Senate from extending any other expiring laws until it extends unemployment benefits and subsidized health insurance for laid off workers.

Sen. Jim Bunning (R-Ky.) is single-handedly blocking Senate action needed to prevent an estimated 1.2 million American workers from prematurely losing their unemployment benefits next month. When, on the Senate floor, Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) begged him to drop his objection Bunning replied: “Tough shit.”

The Senate adjourned on Friday without renewing the benefits. As a result, hundreds of thousands of people will stop receiving unemployment checks every week, starting Monday.

Wyden is outraged. “Denying [the unemployed] legislation that helps them pay for the basic necessities of life is fundamentally wrong,” Wyden told HuffPost. “For people that are getting hammered in this economy, trying literally to figure out from their kitchen table and their living rooms how they’re going to get by, this legislation is a lifeline.”

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It’s a vicious cycle….jobs pay less, people spend less, more jobs lost, jobs pay less.

The U.S. economy unexpectedly shed another 85,000 jobs in December, the Labor Department reported Friday, but the unemployment rate managed to hold steady at 10 percent, and most analysts still expect a gradual improvement in coming months.

Economists had predicted an average of just 8,000 new job losses. There was a spot of good news when the Labor Department released revised figures for November showing that the economy actually added 4,000 jobs in that month, as opposed to the loss of 16,000 that was initially reported.

“The trend is getting better even though this month’s number was a little worse than economists had expected,” Brian Wesbury, chief economist at Chicago-based First Trust Advisors, tells NPR.

“If you go back 12 months, we were losing 600,000 jobs a month, and that has improved significantly,” he says.

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WASHINGTON — President Obama presented a series of initiatives on Tuesday aimed at turning around the nation’s beleaguered job market, paying particular attention to increasing the hiring of small businesses by opening lines of credit and offering tax breaks to try to lower the double-digit unemployment rate.

“Even though we have reduced the deluge of job losses to a relative trickle, we are not yet creating jobs at a pace to help all those families who’ve been swept up in the flood,” Mr. Obama said. “There are more than 7 million fewer Americans with jobs today than when this recession began. That’s a staggering figure and one that reflects not only the depths of the hole from which we must ascend, but also a continuing human tragedy.”

The president outlined his proposals in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan research group not far from the White House. It was the latest in a series of speeches intended to focus attention on what his administration has done to improve the economic outlook, as well as what it plans to do in 2010, a crucial midterm election year in which the economy will be a central issue.

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The Senate is on the verge of passing a bill extending unemployment benefits up to 20 weeks nationwide, after lawmakers on Monday easily hopped the procedural hurdle bringing debate on the legislation to an end.

The cloture vote was a lopsided 85 to 2. After weeks of haggling over controversial amendments, only Republican Sens. Christopher Bond (Mo.) and Jim DeMint (S.C.) voted against the measure.

Under Senate rules, Democratic leaders have to wait at least 30 hours before staging the final vote, unless Republican leaders agree to an earlier time. Without such an agreement, the final vote will likely take place Wednesday morning.

Afterward, House leaders — who passed a less generous extension in September — would have to approve the Senate bill before it could move to the White House for the president’s signature.

SOURCE.

I believe it’s time to take a long hard look at universal health care.   Unless we, as a nation, are willing to let people die from lack of medication and health care we are going to  have to find an alternative system.

By Theresa Tamkins

Only about one in 10 workers who lose their job opt to keep their employer-sponsored health insurance through the safety-net program COBRA, most likely because the premiums are too expensive, according to an analysis released Friday by the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that supports independent research on health care issues.

Experts worry that the highest unemployment rate in 16 years, combined with a health care system dependent on employer-sponsored health insurance, is a recipe for disaster, and will swell the ranks of the uninsured particularly if people aren’t using COBRA. About 46 million people in the United States (18 percent of those under 65) lacked health insurance in 2007.

[snip]

It’s a problem that “is not going away,” says Davis, “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that we’re going to go to 8.3 percent unemployed in 2009 and 9 percent in 2010,” says Davis. (The unemployment rate was 7.2 percent in December.)

She notes that each percentage point increase in the unemployment rate leads to a 1.1 million increase in the number of uninsured.

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