Just before the Christmas break, negotiations on the so-called fiscal cliff ended on an absurdist note. House Republicans not only rejected President Obama’s overly generous budget deal, including his offer to lift the income threshold for higher tax rates to $400,000 a year from $250,000, they also rejected their own leadership’s proposal to raise the threshold for higher taxes to $1 million and to preserve tax breaks for the heirs of multimillion-dollar estates.

Most of the fiscal-cliff discussion has focused on higher income tax rates from the expiration of the Bush-era tax cuts and automatic across-the-board spending cuts. But failure to reach a deal by year-end would also bring about deeper and more immediate pain for low- and middle-income Americans.

No deal means the end of federal unemployment benefits, averaging $290 a week. Some two million people would be cut off immediately, and nearly one million more who would be cut off in the first quarter of 2013. It means the end of the 2 percent payroll tax cut, which, for the past two years, has reduced taxes for 125 million households, boosting pay by nearly $1,000 a year for the typical household making $50,000.

It also means the end of improvements in tax credits for low-income working families, as well as a credit for low- and middle-income families with college costs, enacted in 2009. If the credits are pared, some 25 million Americans would lose an average of about $1,000 a year in benefits in 2013, and roughly eight million children would either fall into poverty or sink deeper into poverty. The child tax credit for a single mother working full time at the minimum wage, for instance, would be cut from $1,725 to $165. That would be a huge and shameful step backward.