THE
INDEPENDENT
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N E W S PA P E R
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T HE T UFTS DAILY
VOLUME LXXXI, ISSUE 26
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.
tuftsdaily.com
Wednesday, March 17, 2021
CSPA releases report on Massachusetts unemployment insurance, finds depletion, debt
AVA IANNUCCILLO / THE TUFTS DAILY
The surrounding Medford neighborhood is pictured in the winter. by Alicia Zou News Editor
The Center for State Policy Analysis at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life released a report on Feb. 17 detailing the short-term and long-term challenges of Massachusetts’ unemployment insurance system. The report
also included evidence-based ways for lawmakers to address these challenges. During the COVID-19 pandemic, unemployment benefits have helped to support laid-off workers, which, in turn, helped the state’s economy and tax revenues through the spending of these benefits at local businesses, the report said.
However, in the process, Massachusetts has depleted its unemployment insurance savings account and has had to borrow $2.2 billion from the federal government thus far to cover all the unemployment benefits from job losses. “The pandemic has exposed serious shortcomings in Massachusetts’ unemploy-
ment insurance system,” the report said. The report was written by Executive Director of the Center for State Policy Analysis Evan Horowitz, and reviewed by three individuals from other universities and institutes. This issue is pressing, Horowitz said, because Massachusetts has to pay back the borrowed money,
as well as save for future economic downturns. He explained that the state is supposed to set money aside when the economy is thriving, so it has money to pay for unemployment when the economy is suffering. “What happened this time, the economy was so bad that see UNEMPLOYMENT, page 2
Tufts student to launch college social media app FuzeMee this April by Flora Meng
Assistant News Editor
Christopher Tsetsekos plans to launch FuzeMee, a college social networking app that helps students make friends, find roommates and explore on-campus events through a personalized feed, with co-founders David Graham of Ohio State University and Jon Krouse of Wake Forest University, next month.
Tsetsekos was accepted to the Tufts Class of 2024 but elected to take a gap year and will begin as a first-year in the 2021–22 school year. “Last year, I was a senior accepted to Tufts and I noticed how difficult it was to find and meet my future classmates,” Tsetsekos said. “I wanted to make new friends but the only way to do so would be reaching out to someone on
Facebook [or on other social media apps].” According to Tsetsekos, there are ways to learn about others in your class online, but the number of people and the lack of organization makes it hard for students to make genuine connections with their peers. “There’s a huge Google Sheets with hundreds of rows of students … There’s also an Instagram account where stu-
dents introduce themselves via Google Forms … [but] there’s really no easy way to narrow down your search or create a group chat with people who have similar interests [as] you,” Tsetsekos said. Tsetsekos detailed how FuzeMee presents a solution to this obstacle. “When students create their FuzeMee profile, they answer all these same questions like
FEATURES / page 4
OPINION / page 7
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hometown, major and interests and from there, they can easily connect with anyone at their school by texting them individually or in group chats [on the app],” Tsetsekos said. Tsetsekos added that FuzeMee is targeted at not only incoming first-year students, but also older students. Users can create customized feeds for see FUZEMEE, page 3 NEWS
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