Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion

Jobless benefits are beginning to expire for those laid off this time last year.

In the coming weeks and months, hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans will exhaust their unemployment benefits, just when it's never been harder to find a job.

Congress extended unemployment aid twice last year, allowing people to draw a total of up to 59 weeks of benefits. Now, as the recession drags on, a rolling wave of people who were laid off early last year will lose them.

Precise figures are hard to determine, but Wayne Vroman, an economist at the Urban Institute, estimates that up to 700,000 people could exhaust their extended benefits by the second half of this year.

Some will find new jobs, but prospects will be grim: Layoffs are projected to go on, and many economists expect the jobless rate, already at 8.5 percent, to hit 10 percent by year's end.

"It's going to be a monstrous problem," Vroman said.

U.S. employers shed 663,000 jobs in March, and the jobless rate now stands at its highest in a quarter-century. Since the recession began in December 2007, a net total of 5.1 million jobs have disappeared.

It gets worse. The unemployment market won't begin to recover until 2010 at the earliest, meaning that by the first part of next year, we'll have millions of Americans running out of unemployment benefits.

They'll lose their homes in 2010, meaning that home prices will continue to fall and more and more as more homes enter the market. No stabilization in the housing depression. No stabilization in the greater economy, just continuous descent into miasma. More families out on the streets, less spending, more layoffs, more unemployment, more people exhausting their benefits...

As bad as 2009 has been and will continue to be, 2010 will be far, far worse. The pace of entropy is accelerating.