DOUBLE STANDARD? Here’s a sad story about unemployment benefits running out, and the sadness is real. But what about all the self-employed people whose businesses have folded during the Obama recession? They don’t get unemployment benefits to begin with, and their numbers don’t show up as layoff victims. And there are a lot of them.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Being a currently self-employed technology consultant who is very near the fold, I can say that the current situation is quite distressing. Friends who’ve been “employed” fear for their jobs, but they have a 99-week safety net. I have nothing. But what is most distressing to me is really the ideology that the moves the pols are making are further destroying the self-empowered, entrepreneurial spirit that made this country great. Forget “socialism”…there won’t be any “little guy” left after this, thanks to the costs and risks.

I’ve been working on a plan, and I’m not an economist or a politician, so I have no clue whether it would work or not. But every time I hear the buzzclip that “half the country doesn’t pay taxes” I get angry…if that’s so true, then why don’t we codify that, and give incentive for that lower half to make their own way: no taxes, no fica, no social security, no filing, nothing, on entrepreneurs that make less than $50,000 per annum. Just let them put it in their pocket. End the “War on Drugs”, bringing inner-city entrepreneurialism above board with an incentive to go legal and nonviolent. Basically, bring the black market to the mass market. That, to me, is “spreading the wealth”, a pull-back of regulation that might work.

It doesn’t have to be permanent, but if the government would move that far out of the economy, I doubt few voters would ever again champion “big government”.

It’s better than the President’s plan.