No Unemployment for You
The same Senate that is always able to find money for wars and bank bailouts will not be passing an umployment extension or a jobs bill. This is utter insanity, when the official unemployment rate is nearly 10%, and the unofficial rate is probably closer to 20% as it was in 2009. The bill is expected to die, and there will be no further attempts to resurrect it. A lot of people are blaming the GOP for blocking the bill, and that is fair, but plenty of Democrats, including Nebraska’s Ben Nelson, are to blame. And of course, the bill is nowhere near enough anyway as it’s been watered down and cut to ribbons by the fools and crooks we elect to represent us.
What happens when the bill dies? This:
Come Friday, 1.2 million people will lose access to the extended unemployment benefits, a number that will grow by several hundred thousand every week after that. Fifty million Medicare claims from June are currently in process at the reduced rate, which the AARP says has already caused some of its members to have trouble finding a doctor. And the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that dropping the $24 billion in aid to states will lead to cuts in services and thousands of layoffs, and that spending cuts to close states’ aggregate budget shortfall absent new federal funds in 2011 would lead to 900,000 public- and private-sector layoffs.
The Republicans will not get blamed for this: it will be the Democrats, the party in power, that suffers. Not that they’ve been sticking up for working families either.
Chris Bowers at Open Left points out:
# Congressional leaders and the White House have agreed on a three-year freeze in non-military discrentionary spending, and the White House has ordered federal agencieis to trim their budgets by 5% on top of that freeze. While agencies will be allowed to cut half of the latter cuts, that still represents a 2.5% cut in discretionary, non-military spending.
# The leader of the Obama administration’s “deficit commission” is pushing zombie lies on social Security’s supposed bankruptcy, and openly talking about how Social Security’s funding has already been spent. From everything I have heard, even from the center-left members of the commission, the final report will recommend cuts to entitlement programs.
# the Obama administration is pushing new line-item veto legislation that would allow for further spending cuts.
This translates into, “America’s leaders are throwing their people to the wolves.”
One of the saddest and most frustrating aspects of life in the US is that nothing changes until there are breadlines, riots, and a real threat of revolution. That was certainly part of what inspired FDR’s New Deal:
Generally speaking, the overall aim of the New Deal was essentially conservative. The New Deal sought to save capitalism and the fundamental institutions of American society from the disaster of the Great Depression. Within that framework, however, significant differences between New Deal programs existed. The “first” New Deal (1933-35) tended toward a continuation of “trickle down” policies, albeit better-funded and executed more creatively. Even in the early first New Deal, exceptional programs pointed toward the “second” New Deal’s tendency toward “Keynesian” economic policies of revitalizing a mass-consumption based economy by revitalizing the masses ability to consume…
Roosevelt was pulled toward the left by both the traditional Left (The Socialist Party of America) and the unconventional left (Dr. Francis Townshend and Sen. Huey P. Long of Louisiana). In 1932 the Socialists’ presidential candidate Norman Thomas had tripled his 1928 showing as hard times rejuvenated the Socialist critique of the system. Nobody thought Thomas posed an electoral threat to FDR; the president was sensitive, however, to the Socialists’ rising popularity.
I wrote a little bit about “political courage”, an oxymoron in the 21st century, if ever there was one, and found myself agreeing with disgraced news anchor Larry Mendte:
I come from a group dubbed “the me generation,” living for the now and not the future. We recently avoided a depression by borrowing from the future.
Avoiding problems rather than dealing with them is what we do best.
Social Security, immigration, clean energy, the deficit, Wall Street reform, the list of problems that we have avoided, leaving them instead to our children, is long.
Contrast that to the generations that have come before. John F. Kennedy said in 1962, “…we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone…”
That quote should embarrass today’s fathers on this day after our day, as our generation chooses not to do the things that are hard. We are more than willing to postpone.
Our generation has been about ourselves, not our children. We love them, and are more than willing to sacrifice as individuals, but not as a nation. We borrow beyond our means; we allow corruption as long as we get ours; we do what is expedient, not what is right.
And so I worry about what we have left our children.
In the current crop of candidates running for office, I see none willing to do the hard things. All are more than willing to put political party and themselves over what is good for our children. We are still the me generation, and I fear the nation’s problems will not be dealt with until we move on into history.
I couldn’t have said it better myself.
I’m looking forward to a debacle in 2010. An utter bloodbath.
