House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi released a statement that probably secures passage for a standalone, unfunded payroll tax cut. Meanwhile, the Senate in negotiating changes to unemployment insurance that may shorten it from 99 to 79 weeks or less or impose other restrictions.

As 2011 comes to a close, millions continue to be without a job, and far too many haven’t had a job for at least half of the year.

To the MOTUs, these are statistics; to me, they are the people I see almost every day. They are my neighbors, my parishioners, and my friends. For them, my new year’s wish is that they find the jobs they so desperately seek. For the MOTUs, my new year’s wish is that they pay the taxes to fund the safety net my neighbors, parishioners, and friends so desperately need.

At the end of the year, the 2% payroll tax holiday on the employee side will end, as will the extension of unemployment benefits. The strategy appears to be to wait until right before the measures are set to expire, and then dare the Republicans to stop the extensions. But if UI passes, it will likely include offsets, a bad precedent for emergency funding.

For what it’s worth, I’m fairly certain that McDonalds goes through a hiring exercise of this nature most every spring; they just consolidated it all to one day this year and apparently received the hoped for public relations splash.

You may not see them out at lunch, in your office, or while you rush to work in the morning. They are the New Unemployed, the long-term jobless, whose numbers have reached historic levels during the Great Recession. They didn’t buy and sell derivative contracts on Wall Street; they didn’t securitize bad mortgages; they didn’t make rotten decisions to over-extend their financial firms. No, they just had the misfortune of living at the wrong time, in the midst of an epic crash. And now they’re being told that their jobs are permanently gone.