The White House is touting it as “recovery summer”: The economy is adding jobs, the unemployment rate is falling, housing is stabilizing and the $787 billion stimulus is working. But it certainly doesn’t feel that way to America’s young workers, who suffer the worst rates of joblessness of any demographic group — more than 18 percent, compared with 9.5 percent overall. And with July in full swing, their jobs situation is about to get worse.

[Economy1] States and regional governments have slashed the summer programs that helped more than 320,000 young people find work last year, as stimulus funding is running out and Congress has failed to re-up the funds. Indeed, $1 billion in funding for summer jobs died along with the jobs bill, now being split up and — for some of its components — passed separately. Even if Congress gets to the summer jobs fund, and passes it, for hundreds of thousands of workers, it will be August, and too late.

This is just one more headwind in what has become a perfect storm for youth unemployment, as young people, without long employment histories, compete for scarce positions with more seasoned workers. The unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds hit 20 percent this spring, and has declined only slightly since then. In some cities, such as New York, it ranges as high as 40 percent. Nationally, one in four working-age teenagers is unemployed — for black teenagers, closer to one in two. In May, the economy created just 6,000 jobs for teens — 120 jobs per state, the smallest number in 40 years.

Spells of unemployment are particularly detrimental for young workers. They tend to have less in savings and less work history than their older counterparts, as well as more debt. Therefore, they are more prone than older workers to falling into poverty when they lose their jobs. And as fewer of them are married, they cannot rely on a spouse’s work for income or health benefits. “Without insurance coverage, these young adults risk both their physical health and their financial security,” the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation reported this winter.

Moreover, unemployment hurts young workers for longer than older workers. In an April report titled “The Kids Aren’t Alright,” the Economic Policy Institute’s Kathryn Anne Edwards and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez detailed the reasons why.

“Work during teen years is characterized as being highly path-dependent — work status in one period is very sensitive to work status in the time period before,” they note. “With a dramatic downturn in the young adult labor market, fewer young workers are being incorporated into this path” — from work in high school to work in college to work afterward. Economists often describe youth unemployment as a “permanent scar,” rather than the “temporary blemish” it is for older workers. Studies show that the lack of early work experience depresses wages for the rest of a worker’s life.

Summer jobs programs couldn’t fix all this, but programs funded with the $1.2 billion infusion from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act certainly were helping. Nationwide, the summer jobs program — centered on aiding young people with barriers to employment, such as pregnancy, school drop-outs or low family income — placed 88 percent of participants into summer jobs. By November 2009, the program helped more than 355,000 young people in all 50 states.

Consider San Bernardino County, in southern California. The unemployment rate there is among the highest in the country — more than 14 percent — and the area has suffered from the lagging effects of the recession, especially the housing bust. Last year, stimulus funding meant work for hundreds of San Bernardino youths, and 43,500 young people across California. This year, the county planned to run the same programs, assuming the same level of federal funding, promised by legislators in Washington. (On the expectation of additional federal funds, and a decline in the unemployment rate, state and local governments used more than two-thirds of the available funds by November of last year.)

But the money is not there, and the county is shuttering parts of the program. It is not alone. Some places — such as Boston — have found companies or nonprofits to keep programs open. Many have not. Nobody knows how many fewer young workers will benefit, but a tally of big-city programs suggests the number is in the hundreds of thousands.

Nor does it look like federal aid will make a late arrival. Even when the Senate returns, it has no plans to resuscitate the jobs package — meaning young workers are on their own.

“We served a record number of kids last year,” says Cathleen Collins, a spokesperson for the New York Department of Youth and Community Development, whose summer jobs program placed 52,000 young people last year. “This year, we are getting less funding from the state, and [$18.5 million] less from the federal government. … We monitored [the jobs bill] on an ongoing basis. It really was not clear to us that the funds would go through. So, we had a program that we could ramp up if it did, but the program is smaller this year” — half the size of last year’s, though unemployment in New York City is higher.

Kalyani Thampi, a research analyst at the National Center for Children in Poverty, stresses that sustained, consistent investments in young people would be best. “It is worth it. It is cost-intensive, and time-intensive, and labor-intensive for governments to set these programs up,” she says. “But in the long term, these kids are given skill sets.” She also notes that the programs focus not on college graduates unable to get jobs, but on young workers who are more income-insecure to begin with — less educated, for instance. “Vocational training and pre-professional programs are becoming more and more important,” though the recession has forced governments to slash spending on such social-safety-net initiatives. “We have many, many unemployed youths who aren’t going to community college or to four-year degrees. They need to get jobs, and they need to be trained.”

In that sense, it is not just the young workers who are missing out — it is the American labor force, missing the opportunity to train young people in the fields of the future.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) (David Becker/ZUMApress.com)

This week, Senate Democrats will attempt to push through a jobs bill that has stalled in the chamber for seven weeks. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) filed for cloture on Monday afternoon, leaving just days before a vote on the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act, or House Resolution 4213, a $140 billion bill to extend federal unemployment benefits and other emergency stimulus measures. The cloture motion signals that Reid believes he has the votes to pass the long-mired legislation. But there are still signs that the contentious, job-saving bill might not pass — leaving people on unemployment benefits, doctors and states in financial limbo.

[Congress1] Calling for an end to debate on the floor, Reid warned, “We’ll learn a lot this week about who wants to fix problems, and who wants to make excuses.” He castigated the opposition party’s intransigence: “If Republicans have their way, next week will be yet another without a lifeline for the most needy, those willing and wanting to work. The other side has slowed and stalled just about every piece of legislation this year — just as they did last year and the year before that.  That’s not a secret. The numbers don’t lie, and Republicans make no efforts to hide their strategy of delay.”

What is at stake? If Congress does not pass the bill, hundreds of thousands will lose their federally extended unemployment insurance. Doctors will take a 21 percent cut in Medicare reimbursement rates, possibly causing them to drop needy patients. Starting in December, the federal government will provide less backing to the Federal Medical Assistance Percentages program, or FMAP, which provides states with money for Medicaid so that the “poorest of the poor,” in Reid’s words, can see doctors.

The bill has broad support, but not broad enough. Reid needs a Republican to cross the aisle to vote for the legislation, and needs to hold the Democratic coalition together. As of Monday, that was not happening. The floor debate was contentious — with Republicans bashing what they view as Democrats’ free spending, and Democrats detailing the impact of job losses and the possible effect of Medicaid cuts in their states. No Republicans have yet come out in favor of the bill, with moderate Sens. Olympia Snowe (Maine), Scott Brown (Mass.) and Susan Collins (Maine) apparently remaining in opposition. Additionally, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) has signaled that he might not vote for the bill as it ups deficit spending.

That means that Democrats might need to pare the bill down. And changing it comes with its own problems. The Senate has altered the House version enough that Congress will need to reconcile the versions or the House will need to re-approve the bill. Differences between the two might make that difficult: Moderate “Blue Dog” House Democrats, for instance, successfully fought for the removal of the $24 billion in Medicaid funding — which Reid hopes to keep in. And every week that Congress does not approve the bill is another week that thousands of the long-term unemployed go without unemployment insurance checks.

Against this backdrop of contentious fighting over deficit spending, President Obama has renewed calls for more stimulus to battle sky-high unemployment rates. Fifteen million Americans — about 9.7 percent of the work force — remain jobless. In a letter to Reid, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), Obama called unemployment a “crisis” and asked the congressional leaders to pass Medicaid funding as well as a new provision to save local workers’ jobs.

“I am concerned … that the lingering economic damage left by the financial crisis we inherited has left a mounting employment crisis at the state and local level that could set back the pace of our economic recovery,” Obama wrote. “The lost jobs and foreclosed homes caused by this financial crisis have led to a dramatic decline in revenues that has provoked major cutbacks in critical services at the very time our Nation’s families need them most. … [If] additional action is not taken hundreds of thousands of additional jobs could be lost.”

McConnell responded, “[B]ecause Democrats can’t seem to resist any opportunity to use a must-pass bill like this as a vehicle for more deficit spending, they’ve piled tens of billions of dollars in unrelated spending and debt on top of it, all at a moment when the national debt has now reached $13 trillion for the first time in history. This is fiscal recklessness, plain and simple.”

Republicans last week released a counterproposal to the Democrats’ jobs bill. But it funds the new jobs bill out of stimulus spending and forces across-the-board governmental budget cuts (exempting defense spending). Democrats oppose the measure.

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.”

He also predicted that the unemployment rate will remain highly elevated. He said the Federal Reserve plans to raise interest rates before the economy hits full employment — echoing comments made by Dennis Lockhart, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta — but did not say when that process would start. “The unemployment rate is still going to be high for a while, and that means that a lot of people are going to be under financial stress,” Bernanke said.

But Republicans, who a month ago were saying that they’d recognize progress when the jobless rate fell, aren’t impressed. Indeed, Republican House Whip Eric Cantor (Va.) just issued a statement blasting the stimulus programs that are propping the numbers up.

[M]uch of what the Administration touts as a ‘jobs recovery’ has caused – and will continue to cause — the deficit to soar. Let me be clear – during challenging times, a job is a job. Yet government jobs that are paid for by taxing small business people and borrowing from the Chinese are not signs of a healthy economic recovery.

He has a point: 411,000 of those 431,000 new jobs are related to the 2010 Census and therefore temporary. Still, any new job creation is good news relative to the hundreds of thousands of jobs the economy was shedding a year ago. And, of course, the idea behind stimulus spending all along has been that the short-term hit to the deficit will be a tiny cost relative to the consequences of federal inaction.

Testifying before the Joint Economic Committee, Keith Hall, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, told the panel that, yes, historically, as labor markets improve, the resulting increase in the labor pool has caused the jobless rate “to bump up temporarily” — a trend that will likely happen this year as well. “We’ve got a particularly high potential for that because so many people are unemployed and we’ve lost so many people out of the labor force,” he said.

But, he added, that spike, because it’s caused by the economy gaining strength, is ultimately misleading.

“If we start to see real improvement,” he said, “we shouldn’t get too concerned if the unemployment rate hits a bit of a speed bump and goes up for a couple of months.”

Unless, from Congress’s perspective, those couple of months arrive around November.

With January’s unemployment figures, the average duration of unemployment has hit another record high of 30.2 weeks, with a historic 41.2% of the unemployed remaining out of work for six months or longer. 11.5 million Americans are collecting some form of unemployment insurance. During the most recent previous peak in long term unemployment in 1983, a comparatively low 26% of unemployed workers were out of work for six or more months, and the average duration of unemployment peaked at 21 weeks.

“With the jobs hole this deep, Congress and the Administration must bravely stare into the headwinds of budget concerns and continue to fortify the safety net throughout this year,” Christine Owens, NELP’s executive director, said in a statement. ”Any faltering of their support will bring disaster for families, communities and the economy.”

Economists are pretty much in agreement that the government, as spender of last resort, must step in with more spending to fill the void left by the drop in consumer spending that’s undermined the jobs market. The short-term borrowing, they say, is much less threatening to the economy than continuation of double-digit unemployment that would surely result without that spending. Whether lawmakers on Capitol Hill have the appetite for it is another question altogether. Early indications are that they don’t.

The economy lost more jobs than expected in December while the unemployment rate held steady at 10 percent, as a sluggish economic recovery has yet to revive hiring among the nation’s employers.

The Labor Department said Friday that employers cut 85,000 jobs last month, worse than the 8,000 drop analysts expected.

A sharp drop in the labor force, a sign more of the jobless are giving up on their search for work, kept the unemployment rate at the same rate as in November.

“This is not only irresponsible, since the purpose of these emergency funds was to prop up the credit system in the midst of a crisis,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the chamber floor Tuesday. “It also violates both current law and the pledge we made that every dollar we got back would be returned to the taxpayer to reduce the national debt.”

This proposal is completely wrongheaded, but it’s perfectly illustrative of the way Democrats in Congress have been dealing with taxpayer money all year — by throwing it at one problem after another without much regard for the consequences. Whether it’s the Stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, or the health care bill that’s currently on the floor, Americans are running out of patience with politicians who promise jobs, but who deliver nothing but more debt, higher taxes, and longer unemployment lines.

Ignored in this critique is the inconvenient Congressional Budget Office finding that the stimulus bill has saved or created 1.6 million jobs this year, with a great deal of the money still left to be spent. Of course, the Republicans this year have already made evident the degree to which they’re concerned for the unemployed, delaying the recently passed unemployment insurance extension for the entire month of October while 7,000 people a day exhausted their benefits.