Exhaustion of Jobless Benefits

An uncertain future after jobless benefits expire, By Cristina Silva (AP), January 29, 2011, Washington Post: “The portraits of his dead father are among the few mementoes Bud Meyers is certain he will take with him when he is forced from his home of five years next month because he cannot pay the rent. His prized collection of mystery novels, the bedroom set he was once proud to purchase new and anything else that can’t fit into the trunk of a car must be left behind. More than two years after Meyers lost his job as a Las Vegas Strip bartender and nearly eight months after he exhausted his unemployment benefits, it has come to this: a careful inventory of a life’s possessions and the hopeless embrace of a future as a middle-aged homeless man. ‘I can’t believe this is happening to my life,’ Meyers, 55, said on a recent afternoon, as he surveyed the one-bedroom apartment he must soon abandon. ‘It’s a social holocaust.’ Meyers, who is single and childless, is among a growing number of men and women who no longer qualify for unemployment benefits because they have been out of work for so long…”