Tag: unemployment

The Department of Labor this morning released its employment numbers for March, indicating that the economy created 162,000 new jobs. Yet the nation’s unemployment...

WASHINGTON-- Sen. Jim Bunning’s (R-Ky.) blockade on extending temporarily unemployment benefits put the Tea Party movement in an unfamiliar position. Instead of nudging the Republican Party to take a stand, activists watched a politician pick an anti-government fight they didn’t even know existed.

Here’s a profound idea from California GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who went after congressional Republicans yesterday for criticizing the Democrats’ stimulus bill one moment,...

WASHINGTON-- It was meant to be a populist legislative victory that would usher Democrats straight through the 2010 midterm elections: a sweeping health care reform bill offering affordable coverage to tens of millions of uninsured Americans, while preventing insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions.

Then came Massachusetts.

WASHINGTON — A protracted partisan U.S. Senate skirmish has left hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans without unemployment benefits — an impasse that Democrats leaders are hoping to break this week. They have their work cut out for them.

Here’s our daily roundup of some of the news around Colorado that caught our attention: • It's not illegal to ask for spare change on...

When do economists predict this good news will happen in the Centennial State? Look below the fold.

While the steady rise of the nation’s unemployment rate has become shorthand for the recession’s impact, many economists say the grim figures — 8.9 percent in April — don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ financial distress. The plight of the jobless tends to dominate social policy conversations and media coverage but a less-exposed but equally vulnerable population is the millions of underemployed. This diffuse, often poorly tracked cross-section of citizens who bear the individual and collective challenges living on the economic fringes often go overlooked by policy makers and elected leaders.

Missing in much of the coverage of the nation's financial meltdown are the kitchen table economics, or the gender-based effects of job loss, wage disparity and stagnant credit markets that historically have disproportionally affected women. As Zach Carter at The Media Consortium Economic News Ladder notes that's not necessarily the case in this deepening recession.

President Barack Obama's sheer popularity will make it harder for members of Congress to water down banking and finance regulations, but his willingness to play legislative hardball has already score a major victory over another key bank lobby priority: student loan subsidies.