Since late December, when the federal Temporary Extended Unemployment Compensation program stopped providing additional aid to individuals exhausting their regular unemployment benefits, a record number of jobless workers have exhausted their regular benefits, gone without federal aid, and received neither a paycheck nor an unemployment check. Based on actual figures through August and the author’s estimates through mid-October:

The three-million figure. From late December through the middle of October, an estimated 3,053,000 unemployed individuals will have exhausted their regular unemployment benefits. About 34,000 of them will have qualified for additional unemployment aid through the federal/state extended benefits program. The remaining three million individuals will not have qualified for any federal unemployment benefits.

The record that has been set. The three million jobless workers exhausting their regular benefits and going without federal aid from late December through mid October is higher than the number of such exhaustees in any other period of comparable length on record.

¶ 11:29 PM