Fiscal deal will cost you: 8 tax changes

Here are eight tax changes under the 'fiscal cliff' deal that may hit your pocketbook.

7. Extended unemployment insurance benefits preserved

Mike Segar/Reuters/File
Job seekers stand in line to meet with prospective employers at a career fair in New York City in this October file photo. A new congressional deal preserves extended federal unemployment benefits for an additional year.

The fiscal deal continues the extended unemployment insurance benefits for the long-term unemployed for an additional year. In some hard-hit states, that coverage provided aid for up to 99 weeks. That coverage was due to expire Jan. 1 and would have caused jobless aid to expire after 26 weeks of state unemployment benefits. By one estimate, the new deal from Congress will keep some 2 million jobless from being cut off immediately and another 1 million from losing the aid early this year.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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