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Just in time for Christmas, Lindsey Asmus is losing her only source of income ? her unemployment check.
The 49-year-old medical billing coder has been out of work since the summer, and will run out of unemployment pay at the end of 26 weeks of benefits in early December.
Republicans in Congress have stymied efforts by Democrats to fund any more federal extension of benefits beyond the customary 26 weeks. Previous extensions approved this summer started expiring last week.
About 56,000 Tennesseans are affected. Some of them have been on unemployment for as long as 99 weeks, according to the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Most have recently lost their benefits or will be hit within the next few weeks.
"(Christmas) will be very bleak," said Asmus, who is single and whose parents live in Minnesota. "I can't go home to visit my parents. I just can't afford it."
The loss of benefits has touched off a long-simmering debate about the true impact of unemployment pay. Does it hurt the economy by encouraging idleness, or does it provide stimulus by providing ready cash to people who'd be hobbled financially without it?
Some of the state's long-term jobless have been getting checks for nearly two years. President Barack Obama's Council of Economic Advisors countered the Republicans on Thursday by estimating that cutting 7 million people from the rolls during the next year will cost the economy 600,000 jobs by December of next year.
The argument goes that the unemployed will cut back on their spending even further and that such a chilling effect will cause even more job losses in the months to come.
Paltry as those checks can be (the maximum in Tennessee has been $300 per week with a boost from the federal stimulus package), the unemployed say the government payments have been essential as they try to pay for groceries, heating bills and monthly rent.
However, others argue that the checks may discourage some people from working, especially if available jobs don't pay as much as the government aid.
(2 of 4)"The overall (Obama) message is distorted or inaccurate," said Bill Ford, an economist at Middle Tennessee State University and former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
"They have no idea what those people are actually going to do when they lose their checks. The research shows that the longer you give out unemployment checks, the longer people stay unemployed."
The long-term jobless ? those unemployed for more than six months ? is at the highest level since records were kept starting in 1948, according to the federal government's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The federal Labor Department reported Friday that the U.S. unemployment rate ticked up from 9.6 percent to 9.8 percent in November, the 19th consecutive month in which the national unemployment rate has topped 9 percent. That breaks the post-World War II record of the 1980s recession.
Yet, some people say it's not an unemployment check that keeps them from finding work. Some people say they've tried relentlessly to land a new job with no offers whatsoever materializing.
Michelle King, a 58-year-old from Ashland City, was cut off from unemployment insurance on Tuesday. She has been trying to find work for a year and a half and says she has had eight job interviews but no job offers.
King said she has told potential employers she'd be willing to take less pay than her previous job, where she made $45,000 per year as a human resources trainer for an IT outsourcing company in Maryland. One company told King it didn't want to hire people for less pay than they used to earn, because they would quit whenever they got a better offer somewhere else.
King now lives in Ashland City after her husband was transferred for his industrial engineering job from Maryland. The Maryland Department of Labor paid King her unemployment, because that's where she lost her job. Maryland was paying King $400 per month, which is more than Tennessee pays. But those benefits just ran out.
"Four hundred dollars per week is not an incentive to stay at home," said the woman, whose adult son is grown and has his own family. "I need a job. I want to build savings, and I want to work."
(3 of 4)Murat Arik, the associate director of the Business and Economic Research Center at Middle Tennessee State University, said the loss of those benefits will cost the state's economy about $160 million in vanished consumer spending over 13 weeks, and the state will lose an additional 1,400 jobs as a result.
The counter-argument that those people will go out and find jobs doesn't work for Arik. He says the Tennessee economy just won't absorb an additional 56,000 workers right now.
Asmus, the medical billing coder, said she applied for 25 jobs and had only one job interview in the past half year. She waited three months to hear back from Vanderbilt after her only job interview. She finally called and was told they'd hired someone else.
There is nobody to support Asmus, and she has no firm plan on how to survive without unemployment benefits.
Not everyone who has been getting unemployment checks falls into such desperate straits.
King, after all, has a husband who still holds a good job. The rent will be paid. The couple probably will spend less this year on Christmas presents for their adult son and his family, but they think the relatives will understand.
Gary Watts lost his job two years ago after 17 years with Whirlpool in La Vergne. His unemployment checks expired three weeks ago after 99 weeks of unemployment. But Watts' wife works and pays most of the bills.
"I really miss the check," Watts said, estimating that the couple will cut back on groceries and do less driving to save on gas.
Still, Watts said he hasn't been inclined to take a part-time $7-an-hour job, because he made more than that drawing unemployment. He made $13 per hour at his previous manufacturing job.
"I really haven't been trying that hard, really," Watts said.
Now he thinks he will work harder to find a job, but there's no telling if he will get one.
Watts feels discouraged. At the age of 61, the former trucker and manufacturing worker with a high school education thinks employers probably won't give him a job.
(4 of 4)"Who is going to hire me at my age?" he said. "No one is hiring. Everyone has a stack of applications. Employers told me they would call if something came up, but they never did."
That brings up another problem with long-term joblessness: the loss of self-esteem and confidence.
The long-term unemployed are more likely to report a loss of self-respect and higher rates of pessimism than people who have been jobless for less than six months, said Rakesh Kochhar, a senior researcher at the Pew Research Center.
Another problem is a structural shift in the jobs market as hundreds of thousands of jobs for certain classes of workers, such as those tied to manufacturing, are lost.
The state of Tennessee alone has lost 87,100 jobs in manufacturing since 2006. Some economists believe this structural shift is occurring much more dramatically than in past recessions.
"The longer you are unemployed, the likelihood of being re-employed drops," Kochhar said.
With retailers counting on the Christmas holidays to boost spending, a lingering lackluster job market and the loss of unemployment checks for thousands of people hold little promise for the economy.
"Some people are losing their benefits at the worst possible time," said Jeff Hentschel, a spokesman for the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development. "We're into the holidays. People tend not to hire at this time of year."
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