The federal government’s report that the nation added 200,000 last month only puts fresh pressure on congressional Republicans to do more to help the struggling U.S. economy, and struggling jobless Americans in particular, according to many both in and out of the Obama administration.

The Labor Department released employment data Friday, which also found the national unemployment rate dropped to 8.5 percent, its lowest level in three years.

Despite the hope that the news represents, it also points out that more must be done, many say.

In all, employers created nearly 2 million private-sector jobs during 2011, according to Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

“We’ve now created more than 3.2 million jobs over 22 consecutive months of private sector growth,” she says. “But our hard-won progress cannot be compromised. Congress wisely extended Unemployment Insurance benefits and the payroll tax cut for two months, but if we’re going to see our economy reach a self-sustaining path to durable and long-term economic growth, Congress will need to extend both programs for at least a full year.

“The American public has spoken loud and clear that it rejects the political gamesmanship that has created uncertainty for businesses around the country,” Solis adds. “Congress should do the right thing and extend middle class tax relief and Unemployment Insurance benefits through 2012 to keep our economy on the path to full recovery.”

Economists estimate that the nation will have to create more than 350,000 jobs per month -– for the next three years –- to get the unemployment rate down to 6 percent, according to Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a progressive Washington policy organization.

December’s figure of 200,000 jobs created means that the economy is barely growing at the rate needed to keep up with the growth of the labor force, Hickey says. The fact that the unemployment rate has declined to 8.5 percent has got to mean that many more people have become so discouraged that they stopped looking for work — and thus are not counted as part of the labor force, he adds.

“The US needs 4 to 5 percent growth to replace the 5.2 million jobs lost since 2007 and to keep up with new people who need jobs. But most forecasters predict that our economy will be lucky to grow at 2 or 3 percent this year,” Hickey says.

“Clearly, if we don’t want to stay stuck at high levels of unemployment –- and the growing inequality that comes with stagnant growth — our government needs to take stronger steps to create jobs,” he adds. “Instead, Republicans in the Congress are still threatening to remove stimulus from the economy by blocking extension of unemployment benefits and continuation of President Obama’s middle-class tax cuts. Today’s report will add public pressure on Republicans to renew those policies before the two-month temporary extension expires next month. But we have to do much more than continuing last year’s modest stimulus. Americans need to pressure their representatives to take advantage of record low interest rates to invest in public infrastructure, energy conservation and renewables, and education. These are investments our economy needs to make anyway –- and if we make them now, we can create enough jobs to escape today’s way-too-modest levels of growth and move our country to full employment.”

Curtailment of Unemployment Benefits

Chad Stone, chief economist at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, particularly worries about the future of unemployment benefits for the more than 13 million out-of-work Americans.

“The job market is nowhere near healthy enough yet to justify a sharp curtailment of federal emergency unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, which give critical support not only to the record numbers of long-term unemployed workers but to the economy as well,” Stone says. “Yet that’s what will happen if, in the coming legislation to renew UI and the payroll tax cut for the rest of this year, policymakers include harmful provisions of the payroll-tax bill that the House passed last month.”

Along with sharply curtailing the number of weeks of benefits, the House bill contained various “reforms,” some of which would undermine UI’s fundamental purpose since its establishment in the 1930s — to provide temporary financial assistance to workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own while they search for a new job, Stone says. For example, the bill would deny UI benefits to all workers who lack a high school diploma or GED certificate and are not enrolled in classes to get one — even though employers paid UI taxes on these workers’ wages — and those taxes effectively came out of these workers’ wages.

It also would allow states to drug-test all UI applicants and condition eligibility on the results — a standard not used for other federal programs ranging from farm price supports to tax subsidies.

“Such provisions should have no place in legislation to extend UI and the payroll tax cut through the end of 2012,” Stone argues.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

Calling them “callous,” a prominent labor leader denounced House Republicans for their approach to extending unemployment benefits to jobless Americans.

The GOP-led House voted Tuesday to extend emergency unemployment insurance beyond the end of the year for Americans, but only after also cutting and restricting the benefits.

“It’s bad enough that Republicans blocked bills to create jobs, but now they cut unemployment benefits for people who can’t find work,” says Jim Hoffa, general president of the Teamsters labor union. “People can’t ‘just get a job’ when there are four unemployed people for every job opening.”

Meanwhile, independent Washington analysts also criticized the Republican approach as both unfair and potentially bad for the overall U.S. economy.

The House voted to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance (UI) beyond the Dec. 31 expiration date. However, the bill cuts unemployment benefits by 40 weeks, requires recipients to have a high school diploma or GED and charges them for re-employment services. Republicans insisted on these cuts.

“Our economy will continue to stall unless we put money in the pockets of people who will spend it,” Hoffa says. “This is a callous move by House Republicans, who apparently don’t care if America’s middle class disappears.”

Unemployment, now at 8.6 percent, has exceeded 8 percent for nearly three years, the longest since the government began keeping records in 1948.

The National Employment Law Project estimates that the cuts in the House bill would cost $22 billion in lost economic growth and 140,000 fewer jobs next year.

The changes to the unemployment-insurance system approved by the House would not only make it harder for workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own to qualify for benefits, but also make the system more costly to administer, according to an analysis by from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a Washington think tank.

The “punitive elements” of the House Republican bill “imply that unemployed workers aren’t looking hard enough for a job and that too many of them are eligible for UI in the first place,” the CBPP analysis says.

“In reality, there are about four jobless workers for every available position, so even if every available job were filled by an unemployed worker, nearly 10 million people would still be unemployed,” it says. “Moreover, unemployed workers already must satisfy numerous requirements to claim UI benefits; largely as a result, only about 40 percent of the unemployed in a normal labor market receive UI.

“Today’s economic conditions, plus forecasts that unemployment will remain high for at least the next two years, justify continuing federal emergency UI as it is currently,” the CBPP analysis says.

Some 40 percent of unemployed Americans have been looking for work for over six months, a larger share than at any time in the last 60 years prior to the current downturn, the analysis finds.

Further, CBPP concurs that cutting unemployment insurance would take needed cash out of the U.S. economy at a time when it needs it. The analysis cites the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which says UI benefits represent the biggest “bang-for-the-buck” to keep the economy moving.

Tuesday’s House vote sets up a likely confrontation with the Senate, where the Democratic majority has advocated for an extension of unemployment benefits free from the cuts and restrictions imposed by the House bill.

WATCH VIDEO OF SENATE MAJORITY LEADER HARRY REID CRITICIZE OTHER ASPECTS OF THE HOUSE LEGISLATION HERE:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.

While the U.S. economy added 120,000 net new jobs in November and the nation’s unemployment rate fell dramatically, to 8.6 percent, those figures don’t tell the whole story, according to one Washington economist.

The seemingly robust job creation numbers that the federal government released Friday in its monthly employment data still aren’t enough to sustain a real drop in unemployment. Also, the economy would have added another 20,000 jobs in November except that many government workers were laid off — mostly from local governments.

Indeed, the rosy-looking drop in the national unemployment rate isn’t in reality good news at all, says Chad Stone, chief economist at the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), an independent think tank.

“The drop in the unemployment rate to 8.6 percent arises from people leaving the labor force, not from a fundamental improvement in job prospects,” he says.

The labor force shrank by 315,000 people in November, accounting for a substantial share of the decline in the number of unemployed, Stone says.

The economy remains sluggish and “calls for aggressive federal action,” he says.

Congress must renew the emergency unemployment insurance benefits and payroll tax cut that are set to expire at the end of this year, Stone says. Those extensions are caught in Republican obstructionism, however.

Enacting President Obama’s American Jobs Act would be useful because its proposals would boost economic growth and employment significantly in 2012 and 2013, Stone says.

But the economic stimulus with the biggest “bang-for-the buck” would be an extension of unemployment benefits for the nation’s jobless, he adds.

“Letting federal emergency unemployment benefits expire at the end of this year would not only be cruel to unemployed workers and their families, but would also weaken the recovery by reducing their capacity to buy goods and services in an economy that is already suffering from weak aggregate demand,” Stone says.

It remains very difficult to find a job.

The Labor Department’s most comprehensive alternative unemployment rate measure -— which includes people who want to work but are discouraged from looking and people working part time because they can’t find full-time jobs —- was 15.6 percent in November, down only modestly from its all-time high of 17.4 percent in October 2009 in data that go back to 1994, according to Stone. By that measure, over 24 million people are unemployed or underemployed.

More than two-fifths (43 percent) of the 13.3 million people who are unemployed -— 5.7 million people —- have been looking for work for 27 weeks or longer, he says. These long-term unemployed represent 3.7 percent of the labor force. Prior to this recession, the previous highs for these statistics over the past six decades were 26 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively, in June 1983.

“Ideally, Congress would enact a program like the President’s to give the economic recovery an additional boost and increase the likelihood that we can start to see the sustained job growth of 200,000 to 300,000 jobs or more a month to make real progress in reducing the unemployment rate,” Stone says. “At a minimum, lawmakers must not hobble the recovery further by letting the $150 billion of purchasing power –- roughly 1 percent of GDP -– represented by the payroll tax cut and emergency unemployment insurance disappear from households’ budgets, which will occur if they do not renew those programs.

The Obama administration made the same argument Friday.

“”Personal income and consumer spending are both up. Americans are showing more confidence in the economy. Now it’s incumbent upon Washington to give them confidence in our government to solve our biggest challenges and put millions of Americans back to work. This is a strong report, but we can’t forget those Americans who lost their jobs during the recession and are still struggling.

“We know what has worked: extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment insurance, and making smart investments in our economy. The clock is ticking,” says Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. “If Congress doesn’t extend emergency unemployment benefits for our long-term unemployed this month, 5 million Americans will lose their benefits next year. These are the everyday heroes of our recovery who have lost their jobs through no fault of their own. They spend all day, every day filling out applications, sending out resumes and looking for work. Now is not the time to turn our backs on them. They deserve better. They deserve action.

“Congress must act immediately to extend emergency unemployment benefits and payroll tax relief,” Solis adds. “We must pass these measures this month to continue the positive trends we’re seeing in today’s report.”

Scott Nance is the editor and publisher of the news site The Washington Current. He has covered Congress and the federal government for more than a decade.