The holidays have been brutal for many Americans, thanks to Republican assaults on the safety net. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits were cut shortly before Thanksgiving, and now, 1.3 million long-term unemployed people face the loss of their unemployment insurance right after Christmas.
That's not news; we've known this was likely for weeks, as the budget deal took shape. But it's worth thinking about every day, because we are talking about the benefits that are keeping many families going.
“People are going to lose their homes, their cars, the ability to pay their bills, their utilities, their mortgages, even maintain a phone or Internet service,” said [Mitchell] Hirsch, with the [National Employment Law Project].
It's a crisis that's got the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Strain occasionally sounding like a liberal, saying "we should think of long-term unemployment as an economic problem, sure, but also kind of as a social failure" even as he makes
conservative arguments for extending benefits:
"Some of them are going to end up on government welfare rolls. It's obviously impossible to know for sure one way or the other, but it's very possible that extending emergency federal UI could save the government money over the next 20 or 30 years by preventing some people who otherwise might end up on Social Security disability insurance or something like that from going on it," Strain says.
Not to mention the
drag on the economy of failing to renew the emergency benefits. But it just can't be emphasized enough that today's congressional Republicans are less interested in helping the economy than in hurting the jobless. Democrats, having failed to get unemployment insurance extended in the budget deal, are now looking at various strategies to try to get an extension passed in early January—including
refusing to support the farm bill unless it includes unemployment—but congressional Republicans already threatening to allow the country to default on its debts are unlikely to be easily pressured.