Failures of Unemployment Insurance.

According to a report recently published by the U.S. Social Security Administration, nearly a fifth of the families and about an eighth of the individuals with incomes too low for bare subsistence in 1963, owed their poverty to involuntary unemployment. The low incomes of the unemployed are attributable in part to low unemployment insurance benefits and the limited duration of those benefits. But many Americans do not realize that large numbers of unemployed persons cannot qualify for any type of public income maintenance payments. One of the disturbing aspects of the unemployment problem in the last seven years has been the amount of long-term unemployment. Those unemployed for fifteen weeks or more comprised less than a seventh of the unemployed on an annual average basis in the early 1950s, they have accounted for more than a fourth of the unemployed in the years since 1957.