The expanded federal unemployment insurance program that provides benefits to millions of long-term unemployed Americans is set to expire at the end of December. If Congress fails to extend it, roughly two million Americans could lose their monthly unemployment checks.

States provide unemployment insurance for the first 27 weeks after a worker loses his or her job; after that, the federal government has provided benefits under the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program passed in 2008. There are currently five million Americans who have been out of work for longer than six months, and of those, virtually everyone who has been out of work since the end of July stands to lose their benefits at the end of the year. Even more could lose benefits by April without a renewal of the EUC program, the Washington Post reports:

These workers have exhausted their state unemployment insurance, leaving them reliant on the federal program.

In addition to those at risk of abruptly losing their benefits in December, 1 million people would have their checks curtailed by April if the program is not renewed, according to lawmakers and advocates pushing for an extension.

Congress last extended the federal unemployment program earlier this year, but it cut the number of weeks of assistance when it did so. More than 500,000 Americans lost unemployment insurance between the beginning of 2012 and the end of July, largely because the formula used to calculate eligibility for those benefits is based on comparisons of state unemployment rates. So even though some states still have persistently high unemployment rates, they have lost access to EUC because those rates have improved slightly since they peaked during the Great Recession.

Republicans have previously created fights over unemployment extensions, arguing that the program creates a culture of dependency and causes beneficiaries to stop looking for jobs. Despite those claims, the EUC program requires recipients to search for jobs while they receive benefits, and studies have shown that recipients of unemployment insurance look harder for jobs than those who don’t benefit from the program.

Last year, several giant retailers opened on Black Friday even earlier than usual, with several stores opening at midnight and cutting into workers’ Thanksgiving celebrations. That hasn’t stopped this year.

So far, Walmart, Sears, and Toys “R” Us aren’t even waiting for the day after Thanksgiving and will open at 8 p.m. Thursday. Target will open its doors at 9 p.m., and Macy’s and Best Buy will start their Black Friday deals at midnight.

But retail employees and their families are protesting the earlier hours and steady invasion on their time with their families. About 40 petitions have popped up on Change.org targeting the earlier openings at Walmart, Best Buy, Sears, Target, and Toys “R” Us, including one from a Target employee’s sister:

Jennifer Ann, 26, started the petition so that her younger brother, a part-time Target employee, can spend Thanksgiving with the family. She asked that her last name not be published to protect her brother’s employment with the retailer.

“Last year he had to leave early, and this year he won’t be able to make it at all,” she said. Her brother, who has worked at Target for a handful of years, is a full-time student. Jennifer Ann said her brother enjoys his job and has no plans to leave Target. [...]

“I just hope next year this doesn’t occur. I hope retailers take a look at this,” Jennifer Ann said. “Every year this gets worst. People want to spend Thanksgiving with their families. Next year, I hope they revert to the way things were when Black Friday was on Friday.“

A spokesman for Sears said customers are asking for “more flexible Black Friday shopping hours,” leading to its earlier hours, and Target’s spokeswoman said the earlier opening was “carefully evaluated with our guests, team and the business in mind.” But Renee, a Target employee, started a petition asking the store to “save Thanksgiving” because the holiday is one of only three days retail employees get off each year, “a day most all of us spend with family we only get to see on that day,” she wrote. More than 180,000 people have signed her petition on Change.org.

Last year, Anthony Hardwick, another Target employee, started a petition challenging the long hours employees had to work when the store opened at midnight. Tens of thousands of people signed his petition, but the stores are still opening even earlier this year. Hardwick, who no longer works at Target, called the creeping of Black Friday into Thanksgiving “ridiculous.” He said, “We’re getting rid of Thanksgiving dinner, and for what? For a $300 flat-screen TV?”

Ahead of negotiations over the so-called “fiscal cliff” and what promises to be another fight over raising the debt ceiling, 63 CEOs representing the largest U.S. corporations, including several Wall Street firms, launched a campaign to supposedly “fix the debt.” However, this campaign calls for additional corporate tax cuts by switching the U.S. to what’s known as a “territorial” corporate tax system, along the lines of that proposed by Mitt Romney.

According to a report by Institute for Policy Studies, the corporations involved could gain up to $134 billion in windfalls if Congress approves such a system, which exempts foreign earnings from the U.S. corporate income tax:

– The 63 companies that are publicly held could gain up to $134 billion in windfalls. The biggest potential winner is General Electric, which would earn $35.7 billion on its overseas earnings of $102 billion.

A territorial tax system actually rewards businesses that offshore jobs and investments. Corporate tax rates are already at a 40-year low of just 12.1 percent. Revenue from corporate taxes has plunged, despite a 60-year high in corporate profits.

Since President Obama’s re-election, Republicans have made rhetorical overtures towards increasing revenue to avoid the coming fiscal cliff, but have so far refused to budge on increasing marginal tax rates on Americans earning more than $250,000 a year.

Instead, GOP leaders have laid out a “compromise” that is virtually identical to the tax proposal offered by failed presidential candidate Mitt Romney, arguing that the country can increase revenue by closing tax loopholes and relying on economic growth. On Tuesday morning, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) directly encouraged Obama to find common ground with Republicans by adopting Romney’s economic proposal:

BLUNT: I think, frankly, this is a great opportunity for the president to step forward, he’s just been reelected, he doesn’t have to run for office again, and come up with a plan that actually can pass. And I think that means, don’t do the across the board cuts, come up with a way to have really targeted cuts and look at ways to increase revenue by one growing the economy, and two, maybe look at the tax code, just like Governor Romney suggested, you look at tax code and increase revenue without increasing taxes.

Watch it:

Adopting Romney’s policies is both bad politics and policy. Republicans have long relied on reducing or eliminating tax deductions to pay for lower income tax rates and deficit reduction — even though tax reform would not produce enough savings to lower tax rates and cut the deficit, and would target deductions that benefit middle class Americans. As the Congressional Budget Office concluded, “Given the barriers to eliminating or reducing most tax expenditures, it may prove difficult to gain more than $100 billion to $150 billion” a year from this approach.

Keeping tax rates low for the richest Americans would also have no significant negative impact on the economy and, if history is any guide, is unlikely to produce the kind of economic growth Republicans anticipate.

Since the election showed that a majority of Americans have largely had it with the GOP’s anti-tax extremism, many Congressional Republicans have tried to present a “compromise“: tax reform that will supposedly lower tax rates but raise more federal revenue via a combination of closing tax loopholes and economic growth, akin to the plan presented by Mitt Romney. The economic evidence has shown, however, that counting on lower tax rates to spark economic growth that ultimately raises revenue is a right-wing pipe dream.

But that hasn’t stopped the party’s failed Vice Presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), from hopping on board. In multiple interviews over the weekend, Ryan implied that revenue would be raised by a tax reform package. As he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

Yes, you can increase revenues without having to raise tax rates. Our fear is that if you raise tax rates you hurt economic growth. You hurt small businesses. So through tax reform you can get higher revenues without damaging the economy. We think that’s the better way to go.

He reiterated this point during an interview with Wisconsin’s News 3:

This is why we don’t think we should raise tax rates, but you can get higher revenues through tax reform. So there’s an area where I think common ground can be reached. But if the goal here is just to keep raising tax rates, then that puts our successful small businesses, which is where most of our jobs come from, out of business.

Watch it:

It’s certainly possible to close enough loopholes that tax reform would raise more revenue. But the GOP is counting on the growth that tax reform will supposedly cause, not the act of removing loopholes, to raise that revenue. As Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) replied when Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) suggested the same idea: “Part of his speech he talked about dynamic scoring, this idea if you cut taxes you increase revenues…It’s about time we debunked that myth, it’s a Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale, dynamic scoring. You may remember Rumpelstiltskin was the fairy tale figure who turned straw into gold.”