According to a new report from the National Employment Law Project, 230,000 Americans will see their unemployment benefits vanish this weekend, even as the jobless rate remains stubbornly high. Nearly half of those losing their benefits live in California, where the unemployment rate is 11 percent:

Long-term unemployed workers in a growing list of states are being abruptly cut from federal unemployment insurance, a new analysis from the National Employment Law Project shows. Due to reductions Congress enacted earlier this year, more than 400,000 workers in 27 states will have lost between 13 to 20 weeks of federal unemployment insurance under the Extended Benefits program by Saturday, May 12th. The cuts come even though long-term unemployment remains near record highs. [...]

The latest round of cuts that take effect in eight states this Saturday will affect more than 200,000 long-term unemployed workers and account for the biggest number of workers to be hit so far, as states like California, Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas are all being phased out at the same time. In California, nearly 100,000 workers are being cut from the extended benefits this week.

These cuts are occurring because the formula under which states receive federal funds for extended unemployment benefits stipulates that those funds disappear if the state’s unemployment rate stops increasing. So because California and other states have seen some improvement in their labor situations, their funds vanish. “The Extended Benefits program is being phased out because state unemployment rates have stopped climbing, but unemployment is still exceedingly high in many places,” said NELP Executive Director Christine Owens.

There are still more than three job seekers for every available opening, according to the Economic Policy Institute, and more than 30 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for a year or more. Considering those numbers, it makes no sense to cut people off from unemployment benefits, which have ensured that millions of Americans don’t slip below the poverty line. According to the Government Accountability Office, 20 percent of those cut off from unemployment benefits by early 2010 fell into poverty.

In his first year and a half as Maine’s Governor, Paul LePage (R) has made headlines time and again for his extremist views and hateful rhetoric. This was to be expected from the man who, during his 2010 campaign, promised voters that they see headlines saying “Governor LePage tells Obama to go to hell!”

But even given his history of obnoxious bluster and stupid comments, a line from his Sunday speech to the Maine Republican State Convention revealed just how callous and clueless he is about the problems facing his constituents.

A Dirigo Blue video of LePage’s speech includes a section in whcih he talks about the need for welfare reform. He told the assembled convention delegates:

LePAGE: There is such thing as a free lunch, but you’re picking up the tab. Maine’s welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government. I am compassionate and committed to our children, our elderly, and our disabled. But to all you able-bodied people out there, get off the couch and get yourself a job.

Watch the video:

If LePage had done his research, he would know that even with the job growth the nation has seen in recent months, there are still 3.4 job seekers for every one job opening. And this has been made worse by public sector job cuts — LePage’s Maine reduced its public sector workforce by five percent over the past year, the second largest reduction in the country.

Later in the speech, LePage promised he and his allies in the legislature would tackle the issue, boasting “Republicans are not the party of kicking the can down the road.” Apparently, they prefer kicking the unemployed and insulting them in the process.

Even as the unemployment rate has slowly ticked down in recent months as the economy has regained all of the jobs it lost since President Obama took office, long-term unemployment remains a persistent problem. More than 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months, and according to a new report from the Pew Fiscal Analysis Initiative, about 30 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for at least a year:

The challenge of long-term unemployment has persisted, even as the overall unemployment rate has continued to improve. According to Pew analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) data from the BLS, the percentage of jobless workers who had been unemployed for a year or more reached a peak of 31.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011. Despite modest improvement in the first quarter of 2012, the rate of long-term unemployment among the jobless remained stubbornly high. In fact, it was more than triple the 9.5 percent rate that it was in the first quarter of 2008, the first quarter of the Great Recession.

Studies have shown that there are several negative effects linked to long-term unemployment, including loss of lifetime earnings and lower earnings for the children of workers who are out of work for so long. One study even found that the long-term unemployed gradually lose important skills, including their level of literacy. Long-term unemployment also decreases life expectancy.

Spain officially plunged into its second recession in three years Monday, just days after the United Kingdom suffered the same fate. The driver of economic slowdowns across the European continent is austerity, the rapid reduction in debt and deficits that fails to address joblessness and leads to economic contraction.

Though the U.S. is experiencing slow but steady economic growth, austere economic policies are jeopardizing the future of the American economy as well. Half of the nation’s recent college graduates are either jobless or underemployed, according to data from Drexel University and the Economic Policy Institute. Republicans seized on the report as proof of President Obama’s failure, but youth employment numbers will only get worse under the GOP’s policies of austerity. That’s because austere government policies hit young workers the hardest, according to a new report from the International Labour Organization, as CNBC reports:

Youth unemployment has been singled out for particular concern in developed economies which critics argue governments have been slow to deal with. [Author of the report Raymond] Torres said the effects of austerity were particularly skewed against youth.

“It’s impossible to see massive declines in youth unemployment unless the economy itself starts to recover, because the youth are disproportionately affected by the stagnation and the recession. There are good practices that show that those countries which combine youth study with work experience do better,” he said.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman notes, Europe provides ample proof of austerity’s failures for young workers. In Ireland, nearly a third of young workers are unemployed. In Spain, the unemployment rate for workers under age 25 tops 50 percent. Across America, public sector budget cuts have hit younger workers hardest. The effects are damning — young workers who enter a depressed workforce spend the rest of their lives making up the lost wages, affecting economic growth for decades.

Conservatives in the United States and Europe have pursued deficit and debt reduction policies with reckless abandon since the end of the Great Recession under the assumption that they would spark investor confidence and inspire growth. The opposite has been true. Austerity is failing across Europe, particularly for the young workers economies will depend on in the future. And yet, Republicans continue to push the same policies right here at home.

According to data from the International Monetary Fund analyzed by Tim Vlandas, there are at least 30 countries with unemployment benefits that are more generous than those that go to American workers. The University of Missouri-St. Louis’ Kenneth Thomas broke the data down:

The metric used is the gross replacement rate (GRR) the ratio of unemployment benefits to a worker’s previous wages. The United States gives, on average, a miserly 27.5% of previous wages in unemployment benefits, behind 17 OECD members, though ahead of 11 others (no data was given for OECD members Iceland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Slovak Republic, and Slovenia). Not only that, the U.S. falls behind 13 non-OECD members, including Algeria, Taiwan, and Ukraine, all of which have at least double the replacement rate of the U.S.

The U.S. does rank ahead of the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia, but trails Egypt, Azerbaijan, and Tunisia in terms of the amount of income replaced by unemployment insurance. And in the wake of the Great Recession, instead of fashioning a better unemployment insurance system, Republicans across the country have slashed benefits, even while some, such as Florida, have high unemployment rates. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers in Congress have blocked and voted against several benefit extensions.

But it remains the case that there are nearly four unemployed job seekers for every available job opening, making unemployment benefits a critical source of income for those who can’t find work through no fault of their own. And contrary to conservative claims that unemployment benefits are a “lifestyle,” those unemployed workers receiving UI stay unemployed less than two weeks longer than those who receive no benefits at all, according to research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve.

In 2009, average unemployment benefits were just $310 per week, with some states paying much less (like Mississippi, with its $192 weekly benefit). As the IMF data shows, that simply isn’t keeping up with the standard set by other developed (or not so developed) nations.