The Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, spurred by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), was formerly launched Thursday during a press briefing on Capitol Hill. U.S. Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) joined Lee and White House officials, experts and advocacy leaders in introducing the caucus and its funding proposals. No members of the Minnesota congressional delegation are involved.

“I remember when having AIDS was a death sentence,” McDermott said, noting that the new caucus was the most significant AIDS-prevention effort since the Bush administration’s AIDS task force. “Believe me, there will be people looking at the AIDS budget [who will say], ‘Why are we putting money into that [during this] fiscal crisis.”

Franks identified himself as one of the most fiscally-conservative members of the House as a way of explaining why he supported the caucus’ AIDS-prevention efforts.

U.S. Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduce Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus.

“My two top priorities as co-chair of the HIV/AIDS Caucus are to better enable faith-based organizations to implement life-saving medical services and to make significant strides so no child is born with HIV after 2015, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to bring attention to this important humanitarian issue,” he said.

Lee said the caucus will focus funding attention on the most vulnerable communities in the country, many of which are communities of color.

“This is the launch time for a bold movement to stamp HIV and AIDS, for once and for all, off the face of the earth,” said Lee, who has been working on AIDS-prevention efforts for the past three decades and managed to get the travel ban repealed in order to secure the International AIDS Conference in the U.S., to be held in Washington, D.C., in July 2012.

No mention was made of federal legislation Lee is currently working on to repeal state laws that criminalize individuals with HIV. The Iowa Independent’s sister site The Michigan Messenger has extensively reported on cases where HIV-positive individuals have been charged with felonies, such as the case of Daniel Allen from Clinton Township, Mich., who in 2009 was charged with bio-terrorism for biting his neighbor during what Allen alleged was a violent anti-gay attack. Because he was HIV-positive, Allen was charged with one count of “possession of use of a harmful device” in addition to various assault counts. The following year, the bio-terrorism charge was dropped, and Allen was sentenced to probation.

Lee’s communications director, Kristal DeKleer, told The Independent that Lee’s legislation, currently known as the “Repeal HIV Discrimination Act,” is still in the drafting stage. Currently, 34 states, including Iowa, have criminal statutes based on exposure to HIV.

In response to a direct question about HIV criminalization, Jeffrey Crowley, director of the Office of National AIDS Policy at the White House, said the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — as part of the Obama administration’s National HIV/AIDS strategy introduced in 2010 and updated this past June — are currently gathering data to come up with a public-health approach of dealing with HIV disclosure laws. Ultimately, though, Crowley said it is a state issue and did not comment on Lee’s not-yet-introduced federal bill.

Crowley told The Independent that the CDC and the National Institutes of Health are prioritizing funding on research that targets populations, such as gay and bisexual men, identified as being at the greatest risk for contracting HIV, in addition to geographic areas where prevalence is highest. He said new information has led the CDC to change priorities (PDF), for example, shifting prevention efforts away from those who are HIV-negative to those who are HIV-positive.

Crowley said efforts are being made to strike a balance between what is better for the health and well-being of the individual HIV patient in addition to preventing others from being infected. He noted anti-retroviral treatment is always voluntary (though there have been instances where prisons have violated HIV-positive protocol) and said he thinks some groups have mischaracterized the federal government’s perceived intent of putting the interest of the nation over infected individuals, but Crowley emphasized it is better to treat patients early “before their immune system is damaged.”

The three caucus members said Thursday the goal is to have 6 million HIV-positive Americans in treatment by 2013.

Tinselyn Simms-Hall, policy and advocacy coordinator of The Women’s Collective, a D.C.-based AIDS-prevention advocacy group, told The Independent she hopes the increased HIV/AIDS-prevention funding reaches women in proportion to their infection rates. She said national focus is often on men who have sex with men, which sometimes prevents other at-risk groups from realizing they are at risk.

“AIDS has a huge impact on heterosexuality,” Simms-Hall said. “There is a large community of women affected [by this virus] who don’t realize there are resources out there.”

Amid constant congressional squabbling over spending and the deficit in Congress, 59 Democrats and Republicans have united in pledging to spend more money for research and prevention efforts to combat the spread of AIDS domestically and worldwide.

The Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, spurred by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), was formerly launched at a press briefing on Capitol Hill Thursday. Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.) and Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) joined Lee and White House officials, experts and advocacy leaders in introducing the caucus and its funding proposals.

“I remember when having AIDS was a death sentence,” McDermott said, noting that the new caucus was the most significant AIDS-prevention effort since the Bush administration’s AIDS task force. “Believe me, there will be people looking at the AIDS budget [who will say], ‘Why are we putting money into that [during this] fiscal crisis,” McDermott said.

Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Calif.), Trent Franks (R-Ariz.), Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) introduce Congressional HIV/AIDS Caucus, Sept. 15, 2011 (AMERICAN INDEPENDENT/Sofia Resnick)

Franks identified himself as one of the most fiscally-conservative members of the House as a way of explaining why he supported the caucus’ AIDS-prevention efforts.

“My two top priorities as co-chair of the HIV/AIDS Caucus are to better enable faith-based organizations to implement life-saving medical services and to make significant strides so no child is born with HIV after 2015, and I look forward to working with my colleagues to bring attention to this important humanitarian issue,” he said.

Lee said the caucus will focus funding attention on the most vulnerable communities in the country, many of which are communities of color.

“This is the launch time for a bold movement to stamp HIV and AIDS, for once and for all, off the face of the earth,” said Lee, who has been working on AIDS-prevention efforts for the past three decades and managed to get the travel ban repealed in order to secure the International AIDS Conference in the U.S., to be held in Washington, D.C., in July 2012.

No mention was made of federal legislation Lee is currently working on to repeal state laws that criminalize individuals with HIV. The American Independent’s sister site The Michigan Messenger has extensively reported on cases where HIV-positive individuals have been charged with felonies, such as the case of Daniel Allen from Clinton Township, Mich., who in 2009 was charged with bio-terrorism for biting his neighbor during what Allen alleged was a violent anti-gay attack. Because he was HIV-positive, Allen was charged with one count of “possession of use of a harmful device” in addition to various assault counts. The following year, the bio-terrorism charge was dropped, and Allen was sentenced to probation.

One of Lee’s staffers told TAI that the representative’s legislation, currently known as the “Repeal HIV Discrimination Act,” is still in the drafting stage. Currently, 34 states have criminal statutes based on exposure to HIV.

In response to a direct question about HIV criminalization, Jeffrey Crowley, director of the Office of National AIDS Policy at the White House, said the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) — as part of the Obama administration’s National HIV/AIDS strategy introduced in 2010 and updated this past June — are currently gathering data to come up with a public-health approach of dealing with HIV disclosure laws. Ultimately, though, Crowley said it is a state issue and did not comment on Lee’s not-yet-introduced federal bill.

Crowley told TAI that the CDC and the National Institutes of Health are prioritizing funding on research that targets populations, such as gay and bisexual men, identified as being at the greatest risk for contracting HIV, in addition to geographic areas where prevalence is highest. He said new information has led the CDC to change priorities (PDF), for example, shifting prevention efforts away from those who are HIV-negative to those who are HIV-positive.

Crowley said efforts are being made to strike a balance between what is better for the health and well-being of the individual HIV patient in addition to preventing others from being infected. He noted anti-retroviral treatment is always voluntary (though there have been instances where prisons have violated HIV-positive protocol) and said he thinks some groups have mischaracterized the federal government’s perceived intent of putting the interest of the nation over infected individuals, but Crowley emphasized it is better to treat patients early “before their immune system is damaged.”

The three caucus members said Thursday the goal is to support 6 million HIV-positive people worldwide* on treatment through the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) by 2013.

Tinselyn Simms-Hall, policy and advocacy coordinator of The Women’s Collective, a D.C.-based AIDS-prevention advocacy group, told TAI she hopes the increased HIV/AIDS-prevention funding reaches women in proportion to their infection rates. She said national focus is often on men who have sex with men, which sometimes prevents other at-risk groups from realizing they are at risk.

“AIDS has a huge impact on heterosexuality,” Simms-Hall said. “There is a large community of women affected [by this disease] who don’t realize there are resources out there.”

*Correction: TAI previously reported that the HIV/AIDS Caucus’ goal was to have  6 million HIV-positive Americans in treatment by 2013; in fact, the goal is to support 6 million HIV-positive people worldwide on treatment. We regret the error.

The new legislation is a stand-alone measure titled American Health Security Act of 2011 [PDF]; Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) filed a companion bill in the House under the same name.

In a press event announcing the bill, the two long-serving legislators were joined by Labor leaders supportive of a single-payer system, including Arlene Baker-Holt, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO; Jean Ross, co-president of the National Nurses United; and Greg Junemann, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers.

A statement released by Sanders’ office quotes the senator as saying:

The United States is the only major nation in the industrialized world that does not guarantee health care as right to its people,” Sanders said at a press conference on Capitol Hill. “Meanwhile, we spend about twice as much per capita on health care with worse results than others that spend far less. It is time that we bring about a fundamental transformation of the American health care system. It is time for us to end private, for-profit participation in delivering basic coverage. It is time for the United States to provide a Medicare-for-all single-payer health coverage program.

The bill proposed by Sanders and McDermott is unlikely to pass; House Republicans have offered a spate of bills aimed at repealing parts of health reform that were viewed as mostly symbolic votes, since Democrats control the Senate and Oval Office.

The 188-page document is lithe for congressional standards. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is nearly ten times as long with 1024 pages. The American Health Security Act of 2011 explains the urgency of the bill’s passage in the first two pages:

(1) While the United States of America spends on average nearly twice as much per capita on health care services as the next most costly nation, the United States ranks 32d among all nations on life expectancy, and 41st on infant mortality.

(2) The number of uninsured Americans rose by more than 4,000,000 between 2008 and 2009 to a total of 51,000,000, or more than 1 of every 6 Americans.

(3) This rise in the number of uninsured Americans was the largest single-year increase since 1987 and was the result of a continued decline in private health coverage, primarily in employer-sponsored insurance.

(4) Small businesses around the country cannot afford to reinvest in their companies and create new jobs because their health care bills are going up 10 or 15 percent every year.

(5) American businesses are at an economic disadvantage, because their health care costs are so much higher than in other countries. Notably, auto- mobile manufacturers spend more on health care per automobile than on steel.

McDermott released a statement on the legislation:

Right now, there are more long-term jobless Americans than we’ve ever had on record, and we can’t just let them all fall off a cliff. I don’t believe how we can cut and run from helping unemployed workers when there are five of them competing for every available job. You only have to hear from a few unemployed workers to know how hard they are looking for work and to feel their sheer sense of desperation. Are we really prepared to just stand by and watch them sink into abject poverty?

The Bush administration and Congressional Republicans presided over the implosion of the housing market and world economic collapse, and handed us the worst economy in 70 years. Ending assistance to the long-term unemployed will reduce consumer demand right at the point when the economy is struggling to get back on its feet.  It will surely increase the number of homes going into foreclosure. And it will drive some individuals permanently out of the labor force. All of these outcomes will increase our nation’s budget deficit. But even worse, they will bring about a crippling deficit of hope for the future.

Any Tier V bill will face steep odds — particularly in the Senate. Some Senate Democrats, such as Max Baucus (Mont.), have indicated they do not support adding new weeks of unemployment benefits. “You can’t go on forever,” he told Bloomberg News in April. “I think 99 weeks is sufficient.” And Republicans have indicated they will block any bill increasing the deficit. McDermott’s office did not immediately release any information on the cost of his proposal. But presumably it will run into the billions, meaning House Democrats will need to look for offsets for the bill to have any chance in the Senate. Previously, aides have told me that while numerous Democrats support the fifth tier, they have hesitated to bring forward a bill they felt would never pass.

But many feel that Congress needs to do something for the millions left adrift after their unemployment benefits end. There are approximately 1.6 million Americans who have exhausted the maximum number of state and federal benefits during the recession. And in some states, there are as many as 10 jobseekers competing for every available position.

Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) is trying to hand over $24 billion in much needed Medicaid funding for states, known as FMAP. A Senate Finance Committee aide writes, “Chairman Baucus continues to work to build the support of 60 Members needed to pass the FMAP funding and is in close contact with [Sen. Harry] Reid on a potential vehicle to extend that policy.”

And House members including Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) are working to try to re-up funding for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Emergency Fund. (Senate Republicans blocked a reauthorization of TANF funding in March.) Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the Speaker of the House, has continued to pressure the Senate to pass House bills authorizing and offsetting the spending.

Speaking earlier this week, Pelosi said that these initiatives have been “paid for, but they have not passed yet: enhanced FMAP funding — paid for; a comprehensive jobs bill — paid for; assistance for teachers – paid for.” She argued:

America’s state legislators and governors have been clear that one of the best ways Congress can help the budgetary crises our states are facing is enhanced FMAP funding.  That’s because it is fungible and flexible. Enhanced FMAP has been both an opportunity and a challenge for you. When Congress included $87 billion in enhanced FMAP investments in the Recovery Act, it helped keep cops on the beat and teachers in the classroom and helped address the health needs of your constituents.  Many of your state budgets have been predicated on continued enhanced FMAP funding.

As you all know, the House passed an extension of FMAP last December in our comprehensive jobs bill. And now, FMAP is stalled in the Senate, even though it has a majority of support in that body.  In order to pass, it must have bipartisan support. You are the most eloquent and persuasive voices on this subject; you know best why this is necessary.  I urge you to tell Republicans in the Senate about the real cost to your communities of their opposition — cuts to hospitals, nursing homes, and public safety, elimination of domestic violence and homelessness initiatives, and slashed budgets for mental health and child welfare services.

She also pushed for edujobs funding, passed by the House and dropped from the Senate supplemental war-funding bill.

The wrangling comes as local government say they might slash as many as 500,000 workers in the next year if Congress does not provide Medicaid, TANF and education-jobs funding for states. A report released yesterday by the National League of Cities, the National Association of Counties and United States Conference of Mayors says that local governments might slash up to 9 percent of their workforces due to congress reneging on promised funds.

“Local governments across the country are now facing the combined impact of decreased tax revenues, a falloff in state and federal aid and increased demand for social services,” the report says. “In this current climate of fiscal distress, local governments are forced to eliminate both jobs and services.”

President Obama signs the unemployment benefits extension bill on Thursday. (epa/ZUMApress.com)

Late Thursday afternoon, President Obama signed into law a bill granting workers out of a job for more than 26 weeks additional unemployment insurance payments, paid for by the federal government. The benefits had been in place since November 2009, but had lapsed for seven weeks — an unprecedented hiatus, given the 9.5 percent unemployment rate. The bill, held up in the Senate for more than two months by Republicans concerned about the deficit, makes benefits retroactive to June 2 and forward to Nov. 30. In states with higher than 8 percent unemployment, workers will continue to receive up to 99 weeks of benefits.

[Economy1] Around the country, the 99ers — those who have exhausted the maximum number of weeks of federal and state unemployment benefits — rejoiced.

“I’m thrilled to death — this is helping two million people,” LaDona King, a 50-year-old from San Diego, said shortly after passage. “That’s very important. That’s not a small thing, by any means. Of course it is overdue — this initially passed in the House on March 10.”

King — a blogger and radio host who under the name Paladinette doggedly advocates for the interests of the unemployed, and 99ers in particular — hopes that help is coming for her next. Indeed, though she makes some money writing about the concerns of the unemployed, King is a 99er herself. (She notes that the $200 a month or so she gets for her writing disqualifies her from food stamps, leaving her to utilize food banks when she needs to.)

She lost her job as a compliance specialist at a Southern California subprime lender a few years ago. That kicked off a string of bad luck: She nearly died when a drunk driver hit her, and was unable to look for work. Her father passed, and she cared for him in his final months. She ended up so depressed as to be suicidal, uninsured and unable to access mental health services. The third and fourth tiers of extended benefits — passed last November — were lifesaving.

“I am still so upbeat, and so grateful,” she said cheerily on the phone. “It’s great when people help people. What I’m really concerned about is the families giving their children up to the state because they can’t take care of them. It’s the people who aren’t healthy. It is the lack of mental health services.”

Now, King advocates for 99ers, pressing members of Congress to extend benefits beyond 99 weeks and to create additional job-training and public works programs to get them back to work. She believes that though Congress has not helped the 99ers yet, the effort has proven successful. “Two months ago, nobody knew who the 99ers were,” she says. “Everybody thought it was some city’s AAA baseball team.”

And she puts the odds at better than 50-50 that Congress will pass something, anything, to help the swelling ranks. “A number of members have told me that there are people working on legislation for the 99ers, that they want to start something,” King says. “I call 25 to 30 a people a day on this on Washington. Thank God for unlimited long distance!”

But even the most active members of Congress on the unemployment issue say there will be no bill to help 99ers by adding a fifth tier of benefits — the most direct way to keep families and individuals out of poverty. “What we’ve seen in this fight is the difficulty of just expanding the program that we have,” says Ed Shelleby, a spokesman for Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), the head of the Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support of the Ways and Means Committee.

The Ways and Means Committee originates most bills concerning unemployment, Social Security, Medicare and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or welfare benefits. Thus far, McDermott is the only member of Congress to have held hearings addressing the plight of the 99ers specifically, and Shelleby says that the congressman “recognize[s] the need to help long-term unemployed folks legislatively” and believes that after unemployment insurance ends “we can’t let millions of people fall off a cliff.”

Still, he notes, “We have to face reality.” The most probable route forward would be expanding existing programs. An additional tier of unemployment benefits is out — something Democratic Senate staffers confirm. But senators including Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) have said they are working on some provisions to aid the long-term unemployed. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has said he supports expanding benefits or creating programs for 99ers. The problem will be finding the money to offset the cost of the programs, and convincing spending-phobic Republicans — who increasingly argue that benefits should be cut to encourage people to go back to work — to vote for them.

The House is not looking at a fifth tier of benefits, instead reviewing public works programs and other ways to subsidize job creation. Shelleby said the expansion of the TANF Emergency Contingency Fund might be one route forward. “That was put in place after the recession hit to help states, basically to aid them in subsidizing jobs,” he said. “It has hugely bipartisan support.” But the fund is only $5 billion — a pittance even compared with the $34 billion benefits extension just passed, itself a pittance of the $150 billion jobs bill Democrats hoped to pass. Quintupling it, if even possible, might have only marginal effects on aid for the 99ers.

The Senate inaction comes as the government reassesses the severity of the long-term unemployment crisis. Previously, the economists estimated the number of 99ers to be around 1 million. (In June, the Labor Department said that 4.3 million Americans have been unemployed for more than one year.) But the number is hard to tally. There is no way to track exactly what happens to individuals when they stop collecting benefits — whether they make it back to work, or stop looking for a job, or continue the job search. And with the recession lagging on, some Labor Department economists believe the number might be as high as two or three million — a population the size of Dallas, and bigger than the U.S. military.

And no matter how big that population is now, economists fear it is set to grow. Ninety-nine weeks ago, the recession had been ongoing for about eight months. But employment is a lagging indicator. It takes some time for businesses to notice the downturn in sales, and to make the choice to start reducing their workforces. That started happening in 2008 — when the pace of layoffs climbed precipitously. In the first eight months of 2008, employers laid off 1.2 million workers. In the final four months, they laid off 2.4 million.

More layoffs two years ago translates into more 99ers now. And with job growth lagging far below levels needed to reduce the unemployment rate, the jobs situation continues to look parlous.

Still, King remains upbeat, and maintains hope that Congress will have to address the plight of 99ers at some point.

“There’s a lot of people suffering. I have to believe they’ll try their best to do something,” she said. “Because there are millions of us waiting to vote in the fall, as well.”

House Ways and Means Committee Chair Sandy Levin (D-Mich.) and Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) had introduced the bill, H.R. 5618, to extend UI through Nov. 30 and to retroactively grant benefits to those who started losing them at the beginning of June.

In the House, the bill failed with a majority — 261-155, with 277 needed to pass. House Democrats suspended certain rules to try to push the bill through on a two-thirds majority. Now, the bill isn’t dead. It goes back to the Rules Committee, then will come up for another vote.

Cindy Paoletti's home-state senators, Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, have indicated they might be willing to extend unemployment benefits beyond 99 weeks. (EPA/ZUMAPRESS.com)

For 23 years, 58-year-old Cindy Paoletti of Salina, N.Y., worked in the corporate accounting division of J.P. Morgan Chase, balancing payroll accounts in an upstate office of the Wall Street bank. In December 2007, Paoletti was let go in a wave of layoffs that eventually shuttered the entire Syracuse operations center. “My job went to India,” she sighs.

[Economy1] Soon after, she started collecting unemployment benefits and severance while searching for a job in earnest. “I apply for everything out there,” she says, estimating she has applied to hundreds of positions over the past 30 months. “But 95 percent of the time, the company you send your resume to does not even acknowledge that they’ve received it. The majority of the time, if you do get an interview, they tell you that you are overqualified. It seems like as soon as they find out your age, everything goes down after there. The age discrimination is horrendous. And everybody in that baby boomer age group is experiencing the same thing.”

For 99 weeks, Paoletti accepted New York state and federal unemployment benefits. This spring, they ran out. Now, she is drawing down her IRA to stay afloat, underwater on her mortgage and without health insurance.

She’s not alone. Indeed, Paoletti is one of a million 99ers, as the long-term unemployed who have exceeded the maximum number of weeks of benefits are known.

The joblessness crisis — in the average duration of unemployment, if not the absolute unemployment rate — is unprecedented in the postwar United States. Of the 15 million unemployed in America, over 7 million have been out of work for more than six months, nearly 5 million for a year and over 1 million for two years — the worst statistics since the government started keeping count in 1948. The proportion of the unemployed out of work for more than six months has doubled in the past year, to more than 46 percent. The jobseekers-to-jobs ratio, which tells how hard positions are to get, remains around 5.6 to 1.

Paoletti and other 99ers are afflicted by a constellation of problems. Many are underwater on their mortgages, meaning they cannot sell their homes and move away. Many are “structurally unemployed,” meaning that demand for their now-obsolete skills will not tick back up as the recession eases. And many have deep ties to their communities, and cannot or will not move for another job. For instance, Paoletti’s father recently passed away after a battle with Alzheimer’s; she helped care for him until his death. Her brother (also unemployed for years now) lives nearby, and her daughter — who moved home when she lost her job, and just found work decorating cakes part-time at a grocery store — lives with her.

The million 99ers like Paoletti do not just struggle with the immediate effects of joblessness — including, in many cases, the slide from the middle class into poverty. They also struggle with the lingering deleterious effects. The longer people are unemployed, the harder it is for them to regain a job. Their skills deteriorate. They tend to lose confidence, become depressed and suffer from higher rates of divorce and suicide.

Paoletti — and many experts — believe that only an expansion of emergency unemployment benefits or a similar intervention from Washington will save her and her cohort from abject poverty if employment does not rebound strongly, quickly. But Washington doesn’t seem motivated to fight for jobs — or for the 99ers. The Senate is currently considering a $100 billion jobs package that might include new money to hire workers for highway repair and to preserve local-government hiring of teachers, as well as tax breaks for employers. But none of the measures under consideration in the bill would keep the benefit checks coming in the mail for more than 99 weeks.

The senators from Paoletti’s home state — Democrats Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand — have both indicated they might be willing to extend unemployment benefits to 100-plus weeks. (This would create a fifth tier of unemployment benefits. Tier IV, created by Congress last year, brought the maximum number of weeks of benefits to 99 in states with high unemployment rates.) Schumer even wrote a letter that was published on the website of Paoletti’s local newspaper, saying, “Once I ensure that every New Yorker receives the full 99 weeks to which they are entitled, I will work with my colleagues to create a fifth tier of benefits. More than 25,000 New Yorkers have exhausted the full 99 weeks of benefits and I am committed to providing them further relief.”

But the Senate as a whole is less than willing. Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has indicated that he will not vote for a fifth tier, as have others. “You can’t go on forever. I think 99 weeks is sufficient,” Baucus told Bloomberg News. Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) likewise dismissed the idea. “There’s just been no discussion to go beyond [99 weeks],” he said. And the Senate leadership, without explicitly shooting down a fifth tier, has nodded in agreement.

Paoletti argues that Washington recognizes the enormity and seriousness of the problem but is turning its back on some of the nation’s neediest. The recalcitrance has led her to go activist. She and some friends are currently lobbying for the final passage of the latest extenders bill, known in online communities for the 99ers as “4213,” its original bill number in the House. It would not help people who have exhausted benefits, but would prevent the expiry of Tier IV extended benefits for hundreds of thousands of people a week. Additionally, Paoletti and others meet up on listservs and websites, fax resumes to Washington and call congressional offices.

She hopes that a hearing on Thursday might prove the turning point for the 99ers. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), the head of the subpanel on income security and family support for the House Ways and Means Committee, is holding the first hearing on policy responses for long-term unemployment. “Our first step to respond to long-term unemployment is obvious — continue the emergency federal unemployment programs to prevent millions of workers from losing their benefits,” McDermott said in a statement. “If we can afford wars, tax cuts and bank bailouts, then we can certainly afford to maintain programs for workers who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own. An increasing number of Americans who have worked hard and played by the rules are now finding themselves with no job, no savings and no support. We must not abandon these workers and their families.”

Paoletti hopes that the hearing — where letters from her and thousands others might be read into the record — will gin up pressure for Tier V. Other solutions likely to be discussed are job retraining and emergency benefit programs. But it all might be too little, too late for 99ers falling into poverty at a rate of thousands per week.

“Out of all the people [I know] that got laid off the same time as me, I think only three have found jobs,” Paoletti says. “The rest are still all have exhausted unemployment or they’re getting close to the end of it. Someone’s got to do something.”

“If we can afford wars, tax cuts, and bank bailouts, then we can certainly afford to maintain programs for workers who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own,” McDermott said in a statement. “But we also need to think about additional steps to help those trying to return to work.”

The hearing comes at a good time: As Annie pointed out yesterday, the long-term unemployed (those without work for more than 27 weeks) now represent almost 46 percent of the nation’s jobless population — the highest percentage since the government starting tracking those numbers 62 years ago.

That means that at least 7 million people have been without work for longer than six months. They’ll be anxious to see what McDermott et al. come up with.

Witnesses have yet to be announced.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) (WDCpix)

Most state unemployment programs are flat broke, according to federal analysts, and the states themselves are largely to blame.

Thirty-four state unemployment insurance trust funds have run dry as a result of the recent recession, forcing those programs to take out nearly $40 billion in federal loans to weather the storm, the Government Accountability Office revealed this week.

[Economy1] The crisis is no accident, experts argue, but instead represents a failure on the part of many states to build up a funding cushion during the good years that could see them through the bad. Unemployment taxes levied on employers, many contend, have simply been too low to provide that insurance.

“Long-standing UI tax policies and practices in many states over three decades have eroded trust fund reserves,” Andrew Sherrill, the GAO’s workforce director, told House lawmakers on the Ways and Means Income Security subpanel Thursday.

Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project, an advocacy group, echoed that message. “States,” he told the committee, “entered this recession far less prepared than they had entered any of [the] recent recessions over the past 35 years.”

The insolvency trend could have far-reaching ramifications, experts warn, threatening the capacity of struggling states to help jobless workers through the next recession. The trend also raises broader questions about how the UI system is funded. Sherrill told lawmakers that the funding formula is ripe for an overhaul.

“The long-term decline of UI funding, culminating in widespread borrowing by state trust funds and the dire financial condition of the program, raises critical questions about the ability of the program to function as it has in the past,” Sherrill warned. “Now is the time … to consider changes to federal program policies that could better assure the long-term financial structure of UI trust funds.”

The trouble, many experts say, is this: State UI programs — which provide 26 weeks of financial help to laid off workers looking for new jobs — are funded with a tax on employers. Yet states are given broad discretion to set their own rates, and in recent decades, they’ve drastically scaled them back. Indeed, between 1978 and 2008, Sherrill said, the minimum state UI tax rate on employers fell from an average of 1.14 percent to an average of 0.37 percent, relative to taxable wages. By contrast, the federal UI tax is an across the board 6.2 percent on the first $7,000 of wages.

“This is the single most important reason why so many state trust funds are insolvent today,” Stettler argued.

There’s another key factor contributing to the problem: The eroding wage base. That is, while states must establish a taxable base income of at least $7,000 (the federal standard) — and while many states go much higher than that — only 17 states index that base to wage inflation. It only makes sense that those states that are taxing a higher proportion of wages tend to have money remaining in their UI coffers. Indeed, NELP estimates that the insolvent states have an average wage base of $9,500, while the figure for solvent states is $20,500.

Some lawmakers are already eyeing the problem. Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), for example, blasted the ill-prepared states Thursday, arguing that they “ignored one of the basic rules of any insurance program, which is to save money in good times to pay out more during hard times.”

Not that the states are solely responsible for ensuring the solvency of the state UI programs. The GAO noted several reforms that Congress could enact on a national scale. The $7,000 federal wage base, for example, established in 1983, isn’t indexed to wage inflation. Doing so would force a number of states to hike their own taxable wage bases, which in turn would yield larger UI pools during periods of economic growth.

McDermott, who chairs the income security subcommittee, hinted Thursday that Congress would play a role in the reform process. “The question that will increasingly confront Congress is whether we can help states suffering from huge deficits in their UI funds, while also encouraging them to take the steps necessary to ensure a strong and solvent unemployment insurance system in the future,” McDermott said. “I think the answer is yes.”

Not everyone on Capitol Hill agrees. Rep. John Linder (Ga.), the senior Republican on the Ways and Means subpanel, blasted the notion that hiking UI taxes is the answer to the current insolvency crisis. That idea, he said, “is just the latest example of Democrats’ desire to never let a serious crisis go to waste.”

“They will use state insolvency caused by the recession and their failed trillion-dollar stimulus law to argue for even higher federal and state unemployment taxes, forever.”