A growing pile of debt for state unemployment insurance programs, By Joey Peters, August 4, 2010, Stateline.org: “When Pennsylvania officials met earlier this year with business and labor leaders to fix the state’s depleted unemployment insurance trust fund, they thought they’d be able to make progress. Since March of 2009, the state has borrowed more than $3 billion from the federal government to continue paying out unemployment benefits. That seemed impossible to sustain. Among the ways to raise money were increasing the wage taxes paid by employers, or simply reducing the level of unemployment benefits to jobless residents. The talks unraveled. Business groups dropped out of the negotiations, possibly because of a proposed wage tax hike. The state’s Department of Labor and Industry is looking into holding new negotiations, this time without that provision, but for now progress on finding a solution is stalled. The result is that after this coming December, when a provision of the federal economic stimulus law expires, Pennsylvania may have to start paying interest on every federal dollar borrowed…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty