Depending on extended unemployment benefits to see you through the Great Recession?

You’d better not: The Senate failed to push back the Feb. 28 deadline to apply for this safety net.

“Right now, the 1.2 million workers who will lose benefits in March are being held hostage by partisan attempts to delay and block this critical legislation,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

Starting Monday, the jobless will no longer be able to apply for federal unemployment benefits or the COBRA health insurance subsidy.

Federal unemployment benefits kick in after the basic state-funded 26 weeks of coverage expire. During the downturn, Congress has approved up to an additional 73 weeks, which it funds.

These federal benefit weeks are divided into tiers, and the jobless must apply each time they move into a new tier.

Because the Senate did not act, the jobless will now stop getting checks once they run out of their state benefits or current tier of federal benefits.

Full report – CNN

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Behind closed doors and with no cameras present, President Obama signed into law Friday afternoon the bill raising the public debt limit from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion.

The current national debt is $12.3 trillion. Check out the National Debt Clock, which tells you your share of that — roughly $40,000 per citizen, $113,000 per taxpayer.

ABC News

Clunker president surrounded by clunker advisors making hundreds of billions of mistakes. How do you spell unqualified puppet leader again?

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The U.S. has a  currency problem. No, not just the dollar, or even the staggering debt and deficit, but another one: It loses money making pennies and nickels. Here is some musing on the problem from the new White House budget docs:

The Mint’s primary cost driver is the price of metal, a factor over which it has no control. Daily spot prices of copper and zinc, the Mint’s two main metallic materials, have fluctuated in excess of 100 percent, and the price of nickel by 500 percent in recent years. This contributes to volatile and negative margins on both the penny and nickel: in recent years the penny has cost approximately 1.8 cents and the nickel approximately 9 cents to produce. Costs have exceeded the value of these two coins by over $100 million in prior years.

Well, the White House and the Mint have a cost-saving solution

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For many Valentine’s Day is something of a Hallmark Holiday but whether you take it seriously or not, one thing’s for certain.

The money earned from all those flower, perfume, and candy sales can have powerful repercussions for the economy.

Cupid will be busy this year. The ubiquitous, pudgy winged icon is expected to elicit over $14 billion in much-needed consumer spending this Valentine’s Day according to the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) 2010 Valentine’s Day Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey.

That works out to approximately $103.00 on average per person for traditional Valentine’s Day purchases. 

Mint.com

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Bob Herbert of The New York Times writes about facing the truth about the structural flaws in our economy:

“Time Is Running Out.” The politicians are clambering aboard the jobs bandwagon, belatedly, but very few are telling the truth about the structural employment problems in the US and the extremely heavy lift that is necessary to halt our declining living standards and get us back to an economy that is self-sustaining.

We’ve now lost 8.4 million jobs in this recession, and a vast majority of them are gone for good.

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