1 Jobless benefits may fall off ‘cliff’ (Kathleen Pender in San Francisco Chronicle) Talk about a hard landing: About 2 million Americans, including 400,000 in California, will abruptly lose their unemployment benefits after December unless Congress votes to continue federal funding for extended benefits. This part of the "fiscal cliff" has received less attention than tax increases and other spending cuts scheduled to take effect Jan. 1.
During recessions, the federal government pays states to provide additional jobless benefits to people who exhaust their regular state benefits, which typically last up to six months. About 2.1 million of the 5 million Americans receiving jobless benefits are on a federal extension that will end after Dec. 29, even if they have weeks remaining in their federal claim, according to Maurice Emsellem of the National Employment Law Project. "It's a hard cutoff," he said. "There is no phaseout," like there would have been every other time the program was in danger of extinction.
Congress has renewed extended benefits 10 times since the current round started in June 2008. At its peak, the program provided up to 73 weeks of benefits (99 weeks if you include state benefits), but now it provides only 14 to 47 weeks, depending on the state's unemployment rate. In California, the maximum is 47 (73 including state benefits).
When the program started, the national unemployment rate was 5.6%. After peaking at 10% in October 2009, it fell to 7.9% last month. Over the past 60 years, the highest unemployment rate at which federal benefits have been cut off was 7.2% in March 1985.
2 US birth rate at record low (BBC) The US birth rate hit a record low last year, led by the decline in child-bearing among foreign-born women, according to a Pew study. The overall US birth rate decreased by 8% between 2007-10, and by 6% among US-born women, found the data. The rate fell sharpest for those hardest hit by the recession: 14% among foreign-born women and 23% among Mexican immigrant women in particular. The 2011 rate was the lowest since 1920, when such records began.
Previous research by Pew concluded that states with the largest economic downturn from 2007-08, were most likely to have experienced fertility declines. But increased access to contraception for Latino women may also be playing a part in the falling birth rate, according to the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. Foreign-born mothers continue to give birth to a disproportionate share of the nation's newborns.
The overall US birth rate was 63.2 per 1,000 women of child-bearing age. It peaked in 1957 during the Baby Boom years, reaching 122.7 per 1,000 women.
3 UK is underemployed (Stephanie Flanders on BBC) Should we be surprised to learn that there are now one million more "underemployed" people in the UK than in 2008? We know that the economy itself is now operating well below potential. So it makes sense that a lot of people should find themselves working fewer hours than they would like.
The UK economy is now around 3% smaller than it was before the start of recession, in the first quarter of 2008. What has puzzled so many people - for so long - is that the number of people in work is now almost exactly what it was then. We are just producing less stuff. You can see how underemployment could help explain a part of that puzzle, if we were working fewer hours, as a country, but sharing those hours across a larger number of people. That is indeed a part of the story: the number of hours worked in the economy has not risen as sharply as employment, which suggests that quite a lot of people are working fewer hours than before - and, it seems, fewer hours than they would like.
4 Dubai back in mega-project mood (Dawn) Dubai is suddenly rediscovering its old habits. That means relentless hype and construction plans loaded with superlatives. Case in point: A proposed Taj Mahal replica four times bigger than the original. Leaders, too, are back swaggering with a mojo that seems aimed to wipe away memories of the city’s humbling fiscal collapse just three years ago. ”We do not anticipate the future,” said Dubai’s ruler Sheik Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum in announcing plans for a new ”desertopolis” that will bear his name. ”We build it.”
It all rings very familiar. The same type of super-charged ambition reshaped Dubai beginning in the 1990s and left an impressive legacy including the world’s tallest skyscraper, a villa-studded island shaped like a palm, malls packed with top retailers and tourist and business networks that are the envy of the Middle East. But it also helped drive the emirate over the edge.
The global financial crisis smacked Dubai particularly hard after years of increasingly shaky construction funding schemes, where state-linked developers often used money collected for one unfinished project to start another. As credit dried up, the deeply indebted Dubai government had to scale back sharply just to meet its bills. It took a $10 billion bailout from oil-rich neighbor Abu Dhabi in 2009 just to give it some breathing room to begin selling off assets and negotiating with creditors for billions more owed by the city-state.
Now with another generation of outsized projects on the drawing boards some are questioning whether the pre-bust creed of bigger-is-better still makes sense in a more cautious world. So far, the only significant outrage from abroad is over a proposed version of the Taj Mahal the ”Taj Arabia” that’s four times larger than the original in Agra south of New Delhi. ”It is patently wrong and absurd,” a former Agra legislator, Satish Chandra Gupta, told Indian media.
The Indian outreach doesn’t end there. A Bollywood theme park is part of a $2.7 billion five-park complex announced by the office of Dubai’s ruler. It also seems to be Sheik Mohammad’s grand response to the fiscal nosedive that shutdown plans for several theme parks, leaving more than one colorful gateway-to-nowhere in the desert. ”Hubris,” said Christopher Davidson, an expert on Gulf affairs at Britain’s Durham University, referring to the blitz of new mega-projects.
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