Congressional Republicans and the White House struck an agreement in principle on Monday night to extend all the Bush tax cuts for 2 more years in exchange for extending unemployment benefits. The GOP agreed to the so-called "Lincoln-Kyl compromise" a partial 2-year extension of the Bush estate tax cuts on estates worth over $5 million. If the deal had not been struck, estate taxes on estates over $5 million would have gone back up from 0% to the pre-cut rate of 55%. Instead, the rate will be 35% for the next 2 years.
You all recall that Ralph Reed was the head of the Christian Coalition for many years and is still considered a leader of the Christian Right, fully forgiven for all his sins.
And you'll also recall that Elliot Spitzer is an immoral libertine who had to be run out of politics for sleeping with a prostitute.
Here' the tail end of the quoted interchange:
SPITZER: It's impossible to get a job out there. You cannot say to those folks -- we should not as a society say, we won't give you enough money to put food on the table for your kids. And the threshold that you're talking about, everybody agrees there should be a threshold. And you know what? We can set it when unemployment gets below 7 percent, 6 percent, 5 percent -- pick a number that we can agree upon that makes sense but not when it's 9.6 percent, or realistically, 16, 17, 18 percent.
This is simply not humane to say to people we won't give you food -- money for food and yet we're giving a tax break to millionaires. That's not the society I believe the United States represents.
REED: Well, that's the problem with making fiscal policy based on the misplaced compassion that doesn't work. The empirical evidence, Eliot, is very clear, which is that people are more likely to reenter the workforce and find a real job that carries with it dignity, self support and no longer being dependent upon the government when those unemployment benefits run out.
That's the empirical evidence.
And then digby says:
The empirical evidence that there are no jobs is simply not relevant to Reed, who evidently truly believes that the long term unemployed are all malingering cheats who need to be "motivated" and that government has no business being compassionate. It's a perfect example of the moral depravity and selfishness of the Christian Right. Meanwhile, it's the horrible (Jewish) commie libertine who's arguing for compassion for his fellow Americans --- as Jesus would surely do.
But this is surely far too intellectual. And far too secular, too.
So, what I want to know is where in the Bible does a poor man come to Jesus, asking what he needs to do to be saved, and Jesus tells him: sell yourself and all your family and all your descendents-to-be into slavery, and take all the money you get and give it to Pharaoh for a tax break.
Just show me one place in the Bible where it says that, and I'll sign up for the GOP economic program--BAM!--just like that.
With 90 Second Summaries, we aim to cover policy items due to receive close attention in the coming weeks and months that are not being properly explained by most of the press corps. As a result, over one third of our episodes cover pieces of legislation that are receiving action or are expected to receive action during this lame duck session of Congress. We did not hit every hot topic on the board, but we got to a good number of them. Without further ado, here's a roundup of the bills we covered that you should know about as the lame duck session unfolds:
A long-term unemployed mechanic demonized by Newt Gingrich is actually suffering the same fate as entire advanced industries over the past two centuries, from railroads to airlines to computers: The presence of significant fixed costs means that competitive prices set by the market lead directly to financial ruin. Some Insights gleaned from Michael Perelman's Railroading Economic
Prelude: A Typical Demonized Victim of Circumstances
Last week, Kieth Olbermann had 52-year-old mechanic Michael Hatchell on his show, along with his wife, Sarah. After months of blaming the anonymous unemployed for their plight, Hatchell had surfaced as the first named individual for conservatives to pounce on, in a WSJ article, and pounce Newt Gingrich did:
"The article also quotes an engineer who admits he turned down more than a dozen offers because the salary would have been less than he made on welfare."
But, of course, Hatchell wasn't on welfare. He was on unemployment insurance, insurance that he had paid into for decades. And why didn't he take just any old job? For the same reason that Ford won't sell its cars for just any old price: He wants to earn enough to survive.
OLBERMANN: You're a 52 years old now former law enforcement officer, used to have your own business as a mechanic, you were employed for 59 weeks [...] and Mr. Gingrich suggests you got used to being unproductive. If that's not true why did you turn down so many job offers?
HATCHELL: Keith, it's really hard for someone like Mr. Gingrich to understand the fact that when you have a mortgage, you have a family to support, car payments, insurance everything else [...] if you're going out to look for a job, jobs that were going to pay half of what I was making, when they were offering me these jobs and [...] this is going to be a situation where we're going to start you out at the entry level wage, I've got 32 years of experience, in the automotive business, it's kinda hard for me to do that. Even at 40 hours at 7.75 an hour [...] With a mortgage and everything else, yes I was drawing unemployment 475 dollars a week, I paid into since I was a young man, 35 years I actually paid into it. It's unemployment insurance, not welfare that Mr. Gingrich has spoken about. Until such time I can get a gainful job that will let me keep my house, keep my family fed, not necessarily anything expensive, I wasn't going to take any other job.
OLBERMANN: He seemed to leave out the idea that it is insurance and you did pay into it. Pay now and don't get it later! If you had taken those lower paying jobs your family would be consiederably worse now than it actually is. HATCHELL: Yes sir, with the mortgage payments, if you don't pay your mortgage, you'll be out on the street [...] When I did find a situation where I did have it better off, I took it.
Imagine that! He wants to keep his house! The nerve!
A Simplistic Moral Fantasy vs. Realworld Complexity
What's happening here is that we're seeing a clash of broadly-defined narrative frameworks. In the conservative framework, the system--in its mythical "free market" incarnation--works perfectly.
A New Way Forward has sent out a call for signatures to pressure Bank of America to join in lobbying for an end to the fillibuster of unemployment insurance. Here's a copy of their email alert:
Friend,
Yesterday's Washington Post reports that there is no extension of unemployment benefits in sight for the long-term jobless. The Senate is filibustering. It's a dire situation.
We need your help to pressure Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, to pressure John McCain to break the filibuster:
It sounds like a strange demand--why not ask McCain himself?--but we all know that BofA has incredible power in Washington, and McCain has ignored pleas from activists.
Here's the idea: If Bank of America came out with an urgent demand for extensions, McCain would act--they've given him enough money, after all. (Along with Goldman and Citi, over a million.)
Tell Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan that he needs to make a statement and proactively lobby for emergency unemployment benefits:
The big banks need to help fix the disastrous unemployment they've caused, just like BP needs to pay for the oil spill. Join Bob Borosage, Mike Konczal, Steve Lerner, Mike Lux and Nomi Prins and make the demand.
Bank of America is heartless not to fight for unemployment benefits extensions. They have so much power in government--we cant let them off the hook.
Pass it on.
Break up the banks!
- Tiffiniy, Donny, Zephyr
A New Way Forward
www.anewwayforward.org
Some copy from their petititon-signature page on the flip.
About a week ago, last Thursday to be sure, a number of media outlets were reporting on a Labor Department report that said new weekly claims for unemployment fallen by 3,000 to a seasonally adjusted 456,000. Most of those same stories included details that total unemployment benefit rolls had fallen by 255,000 to 4.5 million.
(earlier version Cross posted at tpm/and my blog codylyonblogolater)
This morning, Democrats used some of their time on the floor of the Senate to plead with Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) to drop his objection to extending unemployment benefits and COBRA assistance, fixing a 21% cut in Medicare payments, and continuing funding for numerous federal transportation projects whose suspension has left 2,000 workers on furlough. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) put the number of unemployed workers affected at around 400,000 nationwide and said the COBRA assistance would affect 500,000.
With shock and horror, stimulus opponents last week paraded around fragments of a government study showing that less than half the funds included in the now-passed House stimulus legislation would be spent by 2010. This was bad news. But then the Congressional Budget Office released the official (that is, the real) report, which reckoned that 64% of spending would occur before 2011 (85% by 2012). The House Minority Leader responded with vigorous, if seemingly misinformed, enthusiasm: the "so-called stimulus plan" will come "way too late to make any real difference in fixing the economy."
Instead, the House minority party proposed a treasure chest of tax cuts - some for individuals, including deductions for health insurance costs and relief from the alternative minimum tax, and some for businesses, including a carryback loss provision and small business income deductions. The only spending provision would continue the extended unemployment benefits program through the end of 2009.
Certainly, the opposition had succeeded in creating a fast-acting plan. But they seemed to ignore the arguably more important condition that the stimulus stimulate. Indeed, the pesky Congressional Budget Office that stimulus opponents have come to adore reports that the "multiplier" - the amount of economic activity wrung out of a dollar of additional spending or a dollar reduction in taxes - for tax cuts is the smallest of six stimulus policy options. And then there's conservative economist Martin Feldstein who calls the carryback loss provision "primarily lump-sum payments to selected companies." Others call this TARP II.
But this debate about fast-acting, ineffective stimulus versus slower-acting, effective stimulus obfuscates what the House legislation actually accomplishes (even if it raises important concerns about the persistence of the Bush ideology). Indeed, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ties together measures designed to assist struggling households immediately and investment that can help set the stage for an economy built on energy efficiency and durable infrastructure.
Wasn't that something? Mitch McConnell denouncing unemployment insurance? Roger Wicker attacking food stamps? Richard Shelby ranting against senior meals programs? George Voinovich railing against infrastructure spending that would creat 384,000 jobs? Pat Roberts frothing at mouth against weatherizing homes?
Oh, wait...
That didn't happen. None of it did. Not even close. Harry Reid didn't force the Republican obstructionists to actually fillibuster to kill the $56.2 billion stimulus plan in the Senate this week. In fact, he hardly did anything to make it more than the briefest of blips on the sharpest of political radar screens. And therein lies virtually everything you need to know about the political economy of America today, and the sorry, sorry state of our democracy, and the Democratic Party.
When the Democrats gained leadership control of the House and Senate, they were handed enormous power to shape the political debate in our country, and thus far they have utterly squandered that power. This week was no exception, as they actually had a relatively small, but significant de facto Main Street bailout package not just in the works, but on the floor to be voted on, and they simply let the GOP Senators kill it with a silent fillibuster, and no political costs whatsoever.
Had they chosen to make a fight of it, they could have radically expanded and reframed the narrow Wall Street bailout debate to consitute a real debate about economic philosophies and priorities--one that is long, long overdue, and that would heavily favor the Democracts.
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