Americans continue to file for unemployment in alarming numbers

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Published time: September 15, 2011 17:49
Edited time: September 15, 2011 21:50

So what’s up with that jobs plan, Barack?

A week after President Obama stood before Congress and urged lawmakers to pass his American Jobs Act, the Labor Department has released statistics that show that the unemployment epidemic in the US is in need of an answer now more than ever.

The Department of Labor announced on Thursday that incoming applications for unemployment benefits have gone up yet again, with 428,000 applicants filing claims for the week ending September 10, 2011.

Economists have been hoping that the statistic would drop after it surged to 417,000 the week before, but the newest tally puts the amount of applicants at nearly 20,000 more than Wall Street had hoped for.

The number of officially unemployed Americans according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics floats just under 14 million currently, with an estimated 10 million more actually jobless right now.

Obama spoke from the White House’s rose garden earlier this week with a copy of his Jobs Act in hand, urging lawmakers to give it the go-ahead immediately. A Bloomberg poll released shortly after, however, showed that only one-in-three Americans think that the president’s plan will actually be able to save the country. While nearly half of the US still approved of the Obama’s job performance regarding the economy in March of this year, now 66 percent believe that he will continue to fail the country.

The statistics from the Department of Labor come only days after the New York Times published a report in which they attest that more Americans are in poverty than ever before, according to the 2010 US Census. Taking into account the Office of Management and Budget’s official poverty line, around one-in-six Americans are currently living under what the government considers poor.

As more and more Americans end up jobless, they are also resorting to credit lenders in order to stay afloat. The Q2 2011 Credit Card Debt Study released by CardHub.com this week showed that Americans are engrossed in 66 percent more credit card debt at the end of the second quarter this year than they were at this time in 2009.

Unemployment benefit filings have stayed above 400,000 each week since early April of this year with only one week in August serving as an exception. By the end of that month, however, the government reported that the job growth rate for August 2011 was zero.

A total of 7.144 million Americans are currently receiving governmental benefits.