With 9.5 percent of U.S. workers still looking for jobs unable to find one, there is little doubt that extending unemployment benefits would help the ones struggling to pay medical bills, put food on the table or buy school clothes. So we understand why Senate Democrats wanted to extend unemployment benefits to more than 2.5 million Americans whose federal aid ran out in June.

What we don't understand is why those senators couldn't also have found a way to finance the $34 billion emergency extension without further swelling the budget deficit. With a federal debt at about $13 trillion and the annual deficit soaring past $1 trillion, Washington must start paring back before both numbers grow so large they can't be reduced without madly printing money. (If that hasn't happened already.)

It isn't that Senate Democrats completely ignored some of those fiscal realities, which have galvanized America's tea party opposition. The legislation they approved this week started as a $114 billion spending measure that also would have sent money to states to deal with their budget woes and extend a range of tax breaks.

After opposition from Senate Republicans, Democrats rightly stripped out those parts of the bill. Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership declined to take the next step and set aside money to pay for extending unemployment benefits, too. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had suggested using unused economic stimulus funds to pay for the extension, but he was rebuffed.

So we're left with a measure that President Barack Obama signed Thursday that certainly will help many of those families sweating it out in this stagnant economy. These are not your welfare queens but largely working folks who got squeezed by the nasty recession and its painfully slow recovery. We're not here to say these Americans don't deserve help. They do.

But so do the American families that will get socked with the fallout from the no-end-in-sight federal debt.

As we have written before, failure to deal with that debt while it's still possible could mean anything from sky-high interest rates for car and home loans to even higher unemployment rates nationwide to a federal government that can only afford the benefits it is required to pay Social Security and Medicare beneficiaries.

None of those outcomes is something we wish to contemplate, and each will bear directly on taxpaying families in Texas and everywhere else.

This legislation is done, but next time, legislators need to deal with the competing realities of today's jobless numbers and tomorrow's debt obligations.

And there will be a next time. In November, lawmakers probably will have to vote again on extending jobless benefits. We hope they extend the aid that is needed while also finding a way to pay for it.