Tomorrow, 1.3M people will be cut from unemployment benefits. Average benefit: $300/wk.

If you’re single, or a sole breadwinner, or your partner is also unemployed, this is going to be a killer for those folks.

It’s hard to live on $300/wk but impossible to live on nothing.

In NC, if you have no children, you can’t even get on the dole. If you’ve never been unemployed for any length of time, you might not understand the depression and despair that goes with that, even to the point of inaction, of increasing self-doubt, of eroding decision-making ability. I was blacklisted in my normal occupation in the 1990s and lost everything, so I understand those feelings very well, but I survived it. It made me do a lot of reassessing of what I was going to do with the rest of my life, and it wasn’t getting back into the rat race.