Where does this guy live? Certainly not in my North Carolina, where the unemployment rate was 11.2% in December. Does he really think there are thousands of jobs out there going unfilled because all those lazy laid-off professionals are sitting at home, enjoying their unemployment checks? Has he ever tried to pay a mortgage or put a kid through college while on unemployment?

Let’s not forget the impact on the economy. In addition to helping families keep their homes and avoid financial disaster, the previously passed unemployment extensions have helped to stop the country from sinking into an even deeper and more painful recession.

 The National Employment Law Project estimates more than 13,500 North Carolinians will lose their unemployment benefits between March and June if Congress doesn’t pass an extension. And that’s nothing to smirk about.

Salima Mabry watched over her son Tuesday as he slept awkwardly in the chair where he had spent eight days waiting for a bed in a state mental hospital. Joshua Stewart, 13, is severely autistic and has an IQ of 36. He can only speak in short, single words, such as “Ma” or “hurt.” He first arrived at Wake County’s Crisis and Assessment unit for people with mental illness in the back of a squad car on Jan.18 after he attacked his mother and little brother.

As the mother of two sons with autism, one of whom has had serious issues with aggression, I can easily imagine myself in Ms. Mabry’s situation – desperate to find help for my child and also terrified of what he might do next. But I am lucky. My boys got slots in the Community Alternatives Program, which provides them with a variety of services, even as thousands of families around the state remained on the waiting list.

This is how budget cuts impact actual, real-life people. And this issue stretches well beyond the problems with inadequate mental-health funding. It’s about not providing enough teachers and not giving them the training they need so they can help children with disabilities. It’s about refusing to provide funds for early intervention services. It’s about cutting Medicaid reimbursement rates until providers are forced to stop taking those patients.

The budget is about much more than just money.

There is mountains of research and evidence… that early intervention increases the developmental and educational gains for the child, improves the functioning of the family, and reaps long-term benefits for society.

Then there was the piece in today’s N&O that says the state is capping enrollment into its drug assistance program for HIV patients at the current level, meaning low-income people not currently in the program will not have access to the expensive life-saving drugs they need. This sentence in particular caught my attention:

Last year, state legislators allocated $11 million for AIDS drug assistance – about half of what had previously been budgeted, [Jacquelyn Clymore, head of the state’s HIV/STD Prevention and Care branch] said.

That reminded me of a front-page article in the N&O in December that said the state could save $11 million a year by ending the death penalty. The report cites a Duke University study that found the state wastes millions in seeking – not in the implementation, just in the actual pursuit of – the death penalty. In the article, Rep. Paul Stam argued that the death penalty is a crime deterrent, even though decades of research proves otherwise.

So in the end, money that could be used to help children overcome their disabilities or keep people alive will instead be used by the state to pursue the opportunity to kill someone.

The unemployment rate for Black and Latinos is at a 27-year high, 16.2% and 12.9% respectively. But sadly, the stimulus effort has overlooked that. In fact, much of the stimulus has overlooked communities of color all together.

From Ajamu’s column regarding the report, which appears on HuffingtonPost.com:

But even the aid for Main Street favors less-needy whites. By asking states for “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects, the President steered the money towards laid-off construction workers, disproportionately white men who recently had good jobs, rather than to human services and other more diverse occupations. The Associated Press reviewed more than 5,500 transportation projects using federal stimulus money, and found that 50 percent more per person will be spent in the lowest-unemployment places than in the communities that need the jobs most…

A fair jobs policy would not have to explicitly spell out race-equity; literal racial quotas might be controversial enough to kill a bill. But as the 2009 “Put America to Work Act” proposed, it could require the government to target job-creation spending to communities with the highest unemployment rates, or to the workers who have been jobless for the longest time.

President Obama has acknowledged the existence of structural racism. He knows that poor people of color face additional obstacles that poor whites don’t have to deal with.

But when he told the [Congressional Black Caucus] that all he “can do for the African-American community is the same thing [he] can do for the American community, period,” he was operating as if he believed the tired, old, color-blind myth that general anti-poverty programs will reach every group in need. Only by affirmatively targeting the communities pushed backwards by historic racial injustice will recovery efforts reach everyone.

One sentence in the article jumped out at me: “Five elementary schools, with a total of 3,740 students and poverty levels ranging from 56 percent to 94 percent, have no certified teachers.”

94 percent of students in poverty?! In one school?!

I guess that’s the direction we’re heading in Wake County. The new “Gang of Five” running the Wake Co. Board of Education has already voted – in the sneakiest fashion possible – to end mandatory year-round schools, an important tool used to increase economic diversity in schools.

So you have to wonder, do the Gang of Five have a plan for ensuring that the new high-poverty schools they’re working to create will have the high-quality teachers and additional resources they will need? No, of course not. Those schools and the kids who will attend them, it would appear, are not their concern.

When the reporter started listing the worst facilities, I thought, please please don’t let one of them be in North Carolina. Then she said it –

Samarkand Youth Development Center in Eagle Springs, North Carolina.

According to the report, conducted by the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, 33.3% of the juveniles who responded to their survey reported being abused, with 20.8 percent saying the abuse was inflicted by staff and that force was used.

These are children, in government custody, who are being victimized in ways that will impact them for the rest of their lives. When will the rest of us grow up enough to be ashamed?

The maker of the iconic BlackBerry mobile phone has selected the Triangle as the site of its newest office…

According to the company’s statement, it picked this area because of its talented workers and has already begun hiring for the new site.

An N.C. Department of Commerce spokeswoman said no state incentives have been discussed to lure the company here.

Low-income, African-American and Hispanic students are struggling in North Carolina schools. They are more likely to fail their end-of-grade tests and more likely to drop out of high school.

What does this demographic shift mean for education policy in North Carolina? It means that as long as we don’t prioritize the needs of our schools—don’t give them the funding they need to keep class sizes small and provide additional help to students who need it—we are shooting ourselves in the foot. As long as we continue to suspend African-American students in alarmingly high numbers and deny access to higher education to many immigrant students, we are robbing North Carolina of an educated and productive workforce. The decisions we make today will resonate for generations.

We’re disappointed to see such a dramatic overall increase, said Alfred Ripley; an attorney and Housing and Consumer Advocate with the NC Justice Center.  We had hoped that all the efforts made across the state to reduce foreclosures would have lowered the annual total but clearly there needs to be more done on the State and Federal level to help people avoid foreclosure.

Experts suggest a number of responses to lower the number of foreclosures in the state such as increasing funding to Legal Service providers and Housing counselors that help people avoid foreclosure; and strengthening and expanding the State Home Foreclosure Prevention Program administered by the NC Commissioner of Banks, and the Home Protection Program administered by the NC Housing Finance Agency.

Our state programs have helped thousands of people avoid foreclosure and without them we would be doing even worse; that being said, with these increasing numbers we need to consider ways of improving and expanding these programs, said Ripley.

On the federal level, Justice Center experts contend that two national programs; the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) and Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) have been a colossal failure and need dramatic improvements. The HARP program is intended to help homeowners refinance home loans while the HAMP program is designed to help homeowners modify home loans.

We are extremely disappointed in the performance of the HARP and HAMP programs, said Carlene McNulty, an attorney with the NC Justice Center who focuses on defending homeowners against foreclosure.  Time and time again we have seen these programs fail to provide relief to homeowners.  The federal government needs to do much more to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.

McNulty says that the programs failure is due in part to the way they are designed but mainly because mortgage servicers are failing to comply with the requirements of the programs and are not working with homeowners to help them avoid foreclosure.

We see many examples where lenders are going forward with foreclosure sales, when a HAMP modification proposal is on the table. This makes no sense.

Proposed rules promulgated by the NC Commissioner of Banks would prohibit a servicer from going forward with a foreclosure if a loss mitigation request is still being considered.

This additional protection is sorely needed, said McNulty.

Click here for 2009 Foreclosure data by county.