Tim Fernholz says the price of a social safety net is low taxes for the wealthy.
Today, 800,000 people lost their unemployment-insurance benefits. Almost 2 million more will lose theirs in January if the government does nothing.
Unemployed people are losing their insurance because Congress can’t agree on a plan to extend benefits for people who have been jobless for more than 26 weeks. That’s six and a half months of unemployment, which may sound long, but consider that there are 2.9 million job openings for 14.9 million unemployed people — one job opening for every five applicants.
