(
)
The number of jobless New Yorkers who will see their unemployment benefits run dry is expected to jump more than 30 percent in September, the first significant uptick since January, The Post has learned.
An analysis of state extended-benefits payments reveals that 13,332 people exhausted their 99 weeks of benefits last month and are no longer eligible to receive a check.
That’s down sharply from the 31,987 that fell off the benefits rolls in January — the result of the massive loss of jobs during the recession, which ended roughly two years earlier — but up from the 10,986 average over the previous three months, according to US Department of Labor statistics expected to be released today.
“The higher unemployment has been causing an increase in the final extended benefits for so long, the Labor Department had to create an entirely new statistic to measure it,” said economist Jonathan Basile at Credit Suisse Securities.
“We never had that kind of statistic before to measure 99 weeks of unemployment and its impact on the economy.
“The outlook isn’t bad enough to call it another recession, but isn’t good enough to call it a recovery, either,” Basile said.
If the uptick in the number of New Yorkers falling off the unemployment benefits rolls isn’t foreboding enough, one forecast shows that as many as 141,000 jobless residents could fall off the rolls in the first several weeks of 2012.
New Yorkers who lost jobs in the recession had struggled by, collecting about $300 a week for a maximum of 99 weeks, thanks to a lengthy safety net of extended payments bankrolled by Uncle Sam.
Economists said unemployment lines are growing longer and longer and backing up, particularly at the end of the line, when 99 weeks of checks are exhausted.
To date, 297,680 New Yorkers have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment checks, made up of several linked programs, starting with 26 weeks at the state level and progressing into added programs for another 73 weeks of checks.
“Jumping from one program to the next has become a fixture in our so-called recovery,” Basile said.
“We’ve gained some jobs,” he said, “but the recession has left such a large hole in the economy it will take several years to fill it.”
Basile believes the loss of unemployment checks might encourage some jobless “to look harder for work or take menial, lower-paying jobs out of desperation.”
The Labor Department said that if extended benefits are halted in an austerity plan by Congress, a total 141,200 New Yorkers will lose their end-of-the-line benefits by the end of January 2012.