No joke that elected Republicans in Congress hate the unemployed. Latest proof is this week’s douche Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl who claimed that tax cuts for the rich are needed more than unemployment benefits. Also it seems that Saint Ronald Reagan was more into wealth redistribution and it wasn’t to regular Americans.
The second highest ranking Republican in the Senate doubled down on a controversial statement he made this weekend, arguing in greater detail that tax cuts for wealthy people should never be offset by tax increases in other areas — but that unemployment benefits need to be fully paid for by either spending cuts or tax increases. In so doing, he claimed candidly that the very existence of unemployment insurance is a “necessary evil,” while tax cuts ought not be paid for by increases in order to make it easier to shrink the size of government.
And the truth about President Ronald Reagan and his economic policy when he took office in 1981:
“Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then. Working people’s share of the benefits from increased productivity took a sudden turn down. This resulted in intense concentration of wealth at the top.”
Dear GOP, Just to let you know that real people are being hurt because you hate the unemployed. In this video from my local television station showed that 7500 people in my county will lose their benefits and not all of them are “just lazy”.
On this holiday weekend, please GOP stop hating America.
*Update*
Here is more proof that the GOP talking point about “the lazy unemployed” is full of crap. Jason Linkins at Huffington Post wrote:
But Linder’s example happens to be an exception. The basic reality for America’s job seekers is that currently there are five people looking for work for every job opening. The average unemployment benefit is a scant $290 per week. And, as Arthur Delaney reported on these pages in early June, there are other difficult-to-ignore facts that harpoon the notion that the unemployed are content to live off benefits:
Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute pointed out that only 67 percent of the 15 million unemployed receive benefits. Even if all those people are enjoying the dole, shouldn’t businesses still be able to hire some of the other five million receiving no benefits at all?
Exactly. If unemployment benefits truly tamp down the motivation of job seekers, there would still be about five million people going after the jobs that Sharron Angle believes exist with a rabid intensity.
On Thursday June 24, the elected Republicans in the Senate gave more evidence that they hate the unemployed. The Senate rejected an extension of unemployment benefits for 1.2 million people. People who have never lost a job can decide that others who have no job don’t “deserve” help. Normal people should be outraged about that. But there is other insults the GOP heaped on the unemployed.
Rachel Maddow summed it up best:
MADDOW: We’ve got the worst long-term unemployment since the Great Depression. This is going to have repercussions in our country and in our culture for generations. The political leadership we’re seeing on the right in response to that called the unemployed animals, drug test them, call them bums, say they’re only out of jobs because they’re lazy and want to be. Insult, insult, insult. To add real injury to all of that insult today every Republican in the Senate plus our friend Ben Nelson, blocked a vote on a bill to provide badly needed help to the long-term unemployed in this country.
And as a result, starting tomorrow, more than a million Americans will lose their unemployment benefits. This might sound like something you’ve heard before. This is the sort of thing that’s been knocking around in and out of the headlines for months now. And it’s true. It’s because Republicans have blocked extensions of unemployment benefits before. It’s kind of been a Republican hobbyhorse lately.
But in the past, the measure has always been saved at the last minute. That didn’t happen this time. Senate Republicans and Ben Nelson really are cutting off the benefits for 1.2 million unemployed people and probably tossing at least some of them out on the street. And as an added bonus, they’re giving up the opportunity to stimulate the economy in the most efficient way we know how. Ta da.
This pisses me off. As someone who has been on public assistance in the past and know many who are on assistance or unemployment, I can tell you NOONEWANTSTOBEUNEMPLOYED. Republicans just rehash the old “welfare queen” red herring whenever real people need help. They didn’t bat an eye bailing out the banks and automakers but when real people need help they complain about the deficit.
The Democrats in the Senate don’t get off the hook totally. Why in the hell do you keep letting the GOP screw the pooch? Need 60 votes for unemployment extension? Really? Knock the shit off and act like a majority party. Letting a minority of 41 control things make you all look stupid.
Of course passing out checks without doing anything substantial to solve the economic problem won’t solve the jobs problem in the long run but not putting oil in a car low on oil just because it hasn’t reached 3,000 miles isn’t going to be good for a car either.
As blogger digby noted:
I have thought from the beginning of the crisis that this was a problem. I could tell from some conversations I was having that people were under the misapprehension that the deficit caused the recession and that ending the deficit is the only way to fix the economy. Many wingnuts are making that explicit claim.
This is one of the reasons why I have been so frantic that the administration was feeding into the deficit hysteria. They don’t seem to get that people don’t actually care about “the deficit,” they care about “the economy” and they fail to make a distinction between the two, especially since we have right wing wrecking crew that makes a point of conflating the two.
I just don’t have time for people who are soooooo full of themselves, who lack any minimal amount of compassion, and who refuse to see the world outside their self involved bubble.
Here is an example:
Missouri farmer David Jungerman has raised the hackles of local residents with a politically-charged sign he’s placed on his “45-foot-long, semi-truck box trailer” on his farm. The trailer reads: “Are you a Producer or Parasite Democrats – Party of the Parasites.” Now, the Kansas City Star reveals that Jungerman has been the recipient of over a million dollars of federal farm subsidies since 1995
Trying to defend himself, Jungerman told the press, “That’s just my money coming back to me. I pay a lot in taxes. I’m not a parasite.”
What this Einstein doesn’t know or refuses to know is even people on welfare pay taxes. They may not pay income taxes but they do pay sales tax plus they paid taxes when they did have a job. Don’t they deserve to get back the taxes they paid?
Jungerman reminded me of those morons during the health care reform town halls when they shouted they didn’t want government run health care while admitting they were on Medicare.
What should really make a normal human mad is that the extension only would have added 0.00043 percent to the national debt.
Ilike the old saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt”. Well it seems US Rep Jim Jordan (R-OH 4) seems not to be familiar with that quote because during a conversation with journalists in Findlay this past week, as he was about to start his second term in Congress, he removed all doubt on a number of issues.
In a question and answer format Jordan ran through the various issues facing the country:
Q: Are we not in different circumstances now? Making more credit available, more money available has not worked. The money has been sitting idle. Does not that argue more for government spending, putting people to work on public works projects who are not at work?
A: I would have to say just the opposite. All the government spending has not worked. When you think about the bailout fever that has grabbed Washington, whether it has been the Fed or it has been the Treasury itself (bailing out) Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie, Freddie, Citigroup, auto bailout… we have tried this. We have been through a year now, spending.
A better approach, I think, is allowing the marketplace, those people who make the marketplace work, to have tax breaks. That will have a better chance of growing the economy versus additional spending.
and this related answer:
Q: What is the threat to the work ethic?
A: Fifty-three weeks of unemployment insurance… When I was in the (legislature), one of the things we Republicans did for welfare reform was… putting on a time-limits component which said if you are an able-bodied adult after two years of welfare assistance, you are done.
As far as respecting the free market, when you look at all the bailout stuff, that is just anti-free market.
Jim Jordan: Tax cuts make sense, but spending a concern published in The Findlay Courier 01/10/2008
Did he check his e-mail or read the papers? The free market led to the bail out when selfish profit mongers did stupid things because of a lack of oversight and millions of people got hurt. It would be like cake frosting when the so-called free market would burst into flames, that it would take out the people who caused the flame out in the first place, but they seem to be the ones who get away with it every time.
I wonder if Jordan has ever had no money or so little he had to decide between filling the tank with gas or dinner?
I find in these comments someone who is out of touch with people who are poor and the working poor. Those who have no money and those who make so little that they are one check away from falling into the social safety net.
I don’t know of or have ever known anyone who wanted to be unemployed. Even after losing a job the bills don’t stop. There might be a mortgage to pay, electricity to keep on.
Of course at the end of a long day at the Capitol, Jordan can slip into his warm bed and not have to be concerned about the unemployed, afterall the free market will save the day.
On the same day Rep Jim Jordan (R – OH 4th) voted against the Wall Street bailout, he voted against H R 6867. What is H R 6867? The short title is known as Unemployment Compensation Extension Act of 2008. The act extends unemployment benefits for people at least until March 2009.
Yes, Jordan who seemed vote against a bill he felt didn’t provide an American solution to the finance meltdown, didn’t seem to want to help people who are out of work and close to exhausting their unemployment benefits. He was one of 28 Republicans to say “Nay” – the only nays on the bill. It passed the House 368 to 28.
Well at least he is consistent and following in the esteemed steps of Michael Oxley who held the seat before him.
I guess it’s okay for the 6 to 10 percent unemployed across his district. They don’t vote, do they?
