Unemployment Benefits

As many as 58,000 Marylanders could be eligible next week for a new federally funded extension of jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed, state labor officials said Friday. The Extended Benefits program, which takes effect Sunday, provides an extra 13 weeks of payments to Marylanders who have run out of their 26 weeks of state benefits plus the 47 weeks of federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation. Employers will not be charged for the benefit, state officials said.

A routine traffic stop by a police officer in Georgia led authorities in Maryland to a suspected identity theft scheme in which state unemployment benefits totaling $170,000 were falsely obtained in the names of dozens of unwitting people. None of the people for whom the benefits were paid out was unemployed, and none knew that someone had applied for the money using their identities, according to federal law enforcement officials assigned to a financial crime task force. The Maryland U.S. attorney's office announced indictments Thursday charging Vivek Jain, 25, of Gaithersburg and Amiee Arora, 31, of Washington with aggravated identity theft and mail fraud.

Jobless Marylanders don't have their unemployment benefits eaten up by "junk fees" on prepaid debit cards like people in other states, according to a national consumer group. National Consumer Law Center last week released a report on prepaid debit cards now used by 40 states to disburse jobless benefits. Maryland didn't take top honors — that went to California and New Jersey — but the consumer group gave the Free State a thumbs up. "It has one of the better cards," Lauren Saunders, managing attorney for the consumer group, said during a teleconference last week.

I am hard-pressed to recall an article printed in this great newspaper with which I've disagreed more vehemently in terms of style and substance than your editorial " Democrats: the new party of no?" (Dec. 7). As a former field organizer for the Obama for America campaign, I have long since tired of the lecturing by this administration and its defenders in the media that we must simply accept what has now become a litany of capitulations and failures to achieve that which we were promised during the historic 2008 election.

December has been billed as the month when Democrats and Republicans will finally get together to iron out a compromise over extending the Bush tax cuts. But recent exchanges of pleasantries aside, it appears only the White House is doing the compromising. The GOP's "all or nothing" strategy is pretty clear. Republicans on Capitol Hill believe they have the upper hand and President Barack Obama will blink. Rather than allow tax cuts for the middle class to expire, he and congressional Democrats will eventually endorse extending them for everyone.

How can Congress not be acting when thousands of Marylanders and millions of Americans are losing their unemployment benefits during the holidays? ( "Anxious time for laid-off workers as unemployment-benefit program expires," Nov. 29.) My partner and I were laid off from a government contracting job at the same time back in May. We have both sent out hundreds of resumes and gotten no job offers. We have had our home foreclosed on and had to move into a one-bedroom apartment.

Mildred Miller was just notified that her unemployment benefits will be cut off two weeks before Christmas. She can't think about it without breaking down. "I don't know what I'm going to do; I really don't know," Miller said Monday, her eyes welling with tears as she scanned job listings at Baltimore County's work force development center in Essex. "I don't want to get evicted. If we get on the street, I don't know where we'll be. " The Middle River resident, a single mother with a 6-year-old son, is one of thousands in Maryland and about 2 million nationwide whose payments will be phased out in December if the federally funded emergency unemployment compensation program expires Tuesday as planned.

Thousands of Marylanders face being cut off from unemployment benefits next month — just in time for the holiday season — as Congress remains undecided on whether to extend the payments in one of the worst job markets in decades. An estimated 2 million people nationwide are slated to lose benefits, including 14,000 in Maryland. And more than 30,000 laid-off Maryland residents will exhaust their benefits early next year. The phase-out is happening because a federally funded program that gave residents payments beyond the normal 26 weeks lapses on Tuesday.

It's a confrontation few people would want to face: The former security guard sat across the table from the employer who had pink-slipped him as they rehashed his firing. At stake was the payout of unemployment benefits. Jobless workers are entitled to benefits if they lost a job through no fault of their own. In this case, the employer claimed that the man was discharged for absenteeism, while the guard admitted that he had missed work partly because of a drinking problem that he has been treated for since he was let go. Maryland had denied unemployment benefits, and the former employee appealed the case last week to a state hearing examiner.

The nation's jobless have rarely been treated so callously. As of today, another 3,500 unemployed Marylanders will see their benefits expire, bringing the total to nearly 12,000 in similar straits since Congress chose not to extend benefits last month. In all, nearly 2 million unemployed Americans have seen their benefits run out. The public should be outraged by the Senate's failure to extend temporary jobless benefits. Unemployment is still hovering at 9.3 percent, and jobs are hard to find.