By The Editors

After weeks of deadlock in Congress, the Senate and House this week quickly passed legislation extending unemployment benefits to millions of Americans who’ve been out of work for six months or longer.

President Obama swiftly signed the measure Thursday, flanked by three jobless Americans, during a brief White House ceremony. He declared that it would “restore desperately needed assistance” to the two and a half million long-term unemployed who had exhausted their benefits eligibility by the end of May.

Unemployment benefit checks average only $300 a week, a small sum, relatively speaking. But for many of the long-term jobless, who by the sixth month of joblessness have often drained all their savings and other sources on income, it’s all that enables them to avoid complete destitution.

No studies have yet surfaced on how many of those whose benefits were cut off in these past seven weeks have lost their homes or been evicted from their rental apartments.

President Obama also used the occasion to lambast the Senate Republican minority, who, with Democrat Ben Nelson, of Nebraska, held up the measure’s passage for seven weeks while demanding reductions in the administration’s overall economic spending package and urged Congress to quickly pass administration proposals providing more aid to states and to small businesses.

The unemployment measure provides another six months of relief for those cut off since May. They will receive retroactive checks to make up for the benefit payments missed.

But, even though this Congressional political stalemate has been broken, the issue is sure to resurface there because of the central fact of the Great Recession: namely, the jobs-to-jobless ratio.

With nearly 15 million Americans out of work, there are 4.7 workers for every job opening, the highest ratio recorded since the Great Depression seventy years ago. And there’s widespread agreement among economists and other observers that job creation will remain weak, and therefore, unemployment high well into next year at the least.

That means that both the number and percentage of jobless workers who’ve been unemployed for six months and more – now at 46 percent of the total unemployed – will continue to increase. That increase has alarming implications not only for the nation’s treasury but for the morale and productive capacity of the workforce.

For all these reasons, then, the gridlock in Washington over the extension of unemployment benefits has underscored again a fundamental point the Great Recession has driven home. When it comes to finding a way out of the economic crisis, every moment counts.

Lee A. Daniels is Director of Communications for the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, Inc., and Editor-in-Chief of TheDefendersOnline.