The United States economy continues to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, and while substantial progress has been made, more work remains to boost economic growth and speed job creation. Despite ten consecutive quarters of GDP growth and 8.2 million private sector jobs added since early 2010, the unemployment rate is unacceptably high at 6.7 percent, and far too many families are still struggling to regain the foothold they had prior to the crisis. The Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program authorized by Congress in 2008 has provided crucial support to the economy and to millions of Americans who lost jobs through no fault of their own. EUC ended on December 28, 20131. This report argues that failing to extend EUC would be harmful to millions of workers and their families, counterproductive to the economic recovery, and unprecedented in the context of previous extensions to earlier unemployment insurance programs.
