America’s unemployment insurance program is not as robust as those in many industrialized nations, but the program that is speeding toward massive reductions if Congress doesn’t extend it before the end of the year still kept more than 2 million Americans out of poverty in 2011. According to the National Employment Law Project, which is calling on Congress to re-authorize the federal unemployment compensation program before the end of the year, unemployment insurance kept 2.3 million out of poverty, cutting the number of Americans who were entered the ranks of poverty last year in half:

Were it not for unemployment insurance, the increase in the number of Americans living in poverty would have doubled over the last year. (While the number of people in poverty grew by 2.3 million from 2010 to 2011, unemployment insurance prevented an additional 2.3 million Americans from joining their ranks.)

Unemployment insurance is generally handled by the states, but because long-term unemployment was exacerbated during the Great Recession, Congress enacted the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program in 2008. If the federal program isn’t extended by the end of the year, 2 million Americans could lose unemployment benefits, and another 1 million will join them in the early part of 2013. More than 500,000 recipients lost benefits earlier this year because of the way the program is administered and because Congress reduced eligibility for it.

Republicans have pushed against past extensions of the program, arguing that it creates a culture of dependency on federal benefits that reduce the incentive to find work. But the federal program requires workers to search for jobs, and studies have shown that recipients look harder for jobs than those who don’t receive benefits. Meanwhile, in industrialized nations, there is no proof that more generous unemployment insurance programs lead to higher levels of employment: Greece’s unemployment rate, for instance, has soared even though it has one of the least generous programs in the world, while Israel boasts both a generous unemployment program and a falling unemployment rate.

The National Hockey League’s second lockout of players since the 2004-2005 season is now 67 days old, as league owners continue their attempts to extract huge concessions from players. Now that nearly two months of games have been canceled, cities across the country are beginning to worry about lost revenue from those cancellations.

Pittsburgh says it stands to lose $2.1 million for each lost home game. Long Island, New York said in September the lockout could cost it $60 million. Detroit pegged its potential losses at $1.9 million per lost game.

But cities often inflate the impact sporting events and sports stadiums have on their economies, and recent studies show that they’re likely overstating the losses from the NHL lockout too. When economists Robert Baade, Richard Baumann, and Victor Matheson examined monthly taxable sales in three Florida metro areas that have multiple franchises in each of the Big Four sports leagues, they found that work stoppages in professional sports had “no statistically significant effect on taxable sales“:

Our detailed regression analysis of taxable sales in Florida over the period from 1980 to mid-2005 reveals that none of the labor disruptions in the big four professional leagues have been associated with any statistically significant reductions in taxable sales and none of the franchise expansions or new stadiums have been associated with any statistically significant increases in taxable sales.

If that seems counter-intuitive, it shouldn’t. Baade, Baumann, and Matheson, and a host of other economists, have done extensive research that supports the idea that professional sports franchises, and the publicly-financed stadiums in which they play, have little overall economic impact on their home cities. That’s because most of what is spent by fans in and around stadiums isn’t new money injected into the local economy; rather, it’s money diverted away from other sectors of the city’s economy. So when the NHL cancels games, most of the money doesn’t leave the local economy. It’s just spent elsewhere.

“Money not spent by local fans on the NHL is money available to be spent elsewhere in the economy. The NHL’s loss is a gain for local restaurants, theaters, and other entertainment options,” Matheson said in an email. “So, the $2.1 million figure is probably a pretty good estimate of gross losses but an extremely poor estimate of net losses.”

The loss of revenue from NHL games certainly has negative effects for businesses in the neighborhoods around the arenas where those games would be played, and for the people who work at those businesses and staff arenas. But like the effects of stadiums and teams in general, Matheson said, the effect of lost games on the entirety of metro area economies is negligible.