The employment report for February, released on Friday morning, was decent enough. The payroll figure, of 175,000 new jobs, was a bit higher than expected, although I wouldn’t attach very much significance to that. Given the statistical margin of error of plus or minus 90,000, it’s not clear that job creation was any different in February than it was in January, which had a revised payroll figure of 129,000.

In any case, the report confirms that employment creation has slowed down over the past three months. From January, 2013, to November, 2013, the payroll figure averaged about 200,000. Since then, the average has been about 130,000. Some of that decline was almost certainly owing to the frigid weather; precisely how much, we don’t know. But as temperatures rise over the next couple of months, the job figures are likely to pick up again. The stock market rose modestly after the report came out, and it’s widely expected that the Federal Reserve will continue its policy of gradually drawing down the amount of money it is pumping into the economy.

That’s the good news, but it wasn’t all positive.

The most shocking number in the report was 3.8 million. That’s the number of Americans who have been out of work for more than six months, and are classified as long-term unemployed. With payrolls rising and the work force expanding a bit, the tally of people who have been unemployed for less than six months—the short-term jobless—stayed at about 10.3 million last month. But the number of long-term jobless rose by 203,000.

That’s alarming for a number of reasons. First, it confirms what we’ve known for a while: there is a core group of jobless Americans, many of them older than the typical worker, who were laid off during the Great Recession and its aftermath and who aren’t sharing in the recovery to the same extent as others. In normal times, the proportion of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than six months is about one-fifth. But it now stands at more than one in three—thirty-seven per cent, to be precise. Even during a recession, or a post-recession period, this isn’t normal. During the slump of 1983, for example, which was a pretty deep one, the proportion of the jobless who had been out of work for more than six months peaked at about twenty-five per cent.

Over the past year, it should be noted, there have been some encouraging signs. Between February, 2013, and January, 2014, as employment growth picked up, the long-term-jobless figure came down by about a million. But the fact that it jumped again last month is deeply worrying, and it confirms what millions of Americans have come to know the hard way: the longer you are out of work, the harder it is to find another job.

Being a member of the long-term unemployed comes with a stigma. Because you haven’t worked in a while, potential employers tend to treat you with suspicion. If our economic policies were rational, let alone caring, they would be designed to help the long-term jobless overcome this stigma and return to work. One possibility would be to extend temporary job subsidies to firms that hire such workers.

Instead of doing that, or anything like it, we are actively punishing the victims. Since the end of December, thanks to deliberate inaction on the part of the Republican-controlled Congress, the long-term unemployed have no longer been eligible for federal unemployment benefits. If they run out of money, their only options are to remortgage their homes, if they own them, or to apply for food stamps.

Earlier this week, Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, tried again to rectify the situation. He put forward a bill that would extend unemployment benefits beyond the six-month limit and make payments retroactive to December 28th, when the previous extension expired. This is Reid’s third attempt this year to do the decent thing. On both previous occasions, the legislation to extend benefits failed to get the sixty votes necessary to overcome a Republican filibuster threat. Even if Reid gets the extra votes he needs this time—which is a possibility—it seems highly unlikely that the Republican-controlled House of Representatives will pass a similar bill.

Will the new jobs report change the political calculus? Let’s hope so. The latest estimates suggest that more than two million unemployed Americans have already lost their eligibility for benefits, and that figure is rising by the week. According to a recent report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, there could be 3.6 million long-term unemployed who have lost their benefits eligibility by the end of 2014. (It won’t reach 3.8 million, the total number of long-term jobless, partly because many people have been out of work for more than a year, which means they wouldn’t qualify even for an extended program.)

The arguments against extending benefits beyond twenty-six weeks are flimsy. One is cost, and the need to reduce the deficit. But the deficit is falling dramatically already. And at an estimated price of about $6.4 billion for three months, or roughly $25 billion per year, the bill for extending jobless benefits is pretty modest.

The other argument that some conservatives make is about incentives: if you allow the unemployed to collect benefits for extended periods, they are less likely to try and find a new job. But here, too, the evidence is lacking. Studies comparing states that have extended jobless benefits to states that haven’t show little difference in how quickly, or slowly, the long-term unemployed return to work. By far the most important factor is the overall rate of hiring, not the level of unemployment benefits.

By now, it should be pretty clear to everybody, even Republicans, that the vast majority of the long-term unemployed aren’t idlers living it up at taxpayers’ expense. They are innocent victims of the Great Recession who would like to return to work but can’t find a job. For Congress to continue to punish them isn’t just a bad policy. It’s a scandal.

Illustration by Marc Rosenthal.