Just over a month ago, millions hit the largest benefits cliff in U.S. history. An estimated 7.5 million recipients saw weekly pandemic unemployment benefits abruptly end on Labor Day, as temporary federal programs simply shut down as a direct result of the Democrats’ March 2021 American Rescue Plan. The media largely ignored the record benefit shutoff (because of its partisan pedigree and the fact that it primarily affected the residents of blue states), but that’s unlikely to be the case for the next one. Right now, Democrats are crafting an even bigger benefits cliff that would hit tens of millions more monthly benefit recipients across the country in about Christmas 2022.

The latest trillion-dollar spending “framework” released by the White House last week includes a one-year extension of the expanded and now monthly child tax credit payments made in 2021. That’s down from the four-year extension, at the cost of a whopping $556 billion, they included in the original $3.5 trillion version of the legislation, which they are now being pressed to minimize. The new White House framework would also permanently eliminate the work requirement for collecting any future annual payments, perpetuating new work-free welfare benefits forever.