The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
The Good: the Federal unemployment benefits for people out of work for more than 26 weeks may be renewed.
The Bad: the renewal is only for 13 months, when it should have been tied to the unemployment rate, i.e. in effect until the rate falls below 7%.
The Ugly: All of the tax cuts that are building the deficit ever higher have been renewed for two years. The estate tax cut was renewed, adding even more to the deficit. They are reducing the FICA tax withholding for two years. They are not extending the BABs [Build America Bonds], which were keeping state and local governments from bankruptcy in some cases. There was no extension of unemployment benefits beyond 99 weeks.
Taxes are the worse way of stimulating the economy, because the number of people paying taxes is shrinking. The employment numbers for last month show that Christmas hiring was pathetic because people can’t afford to spend on Christmas.
The FICA tax cut is part of the plan to destroy Social Security and was proposed by the Republicans.
People need to keep in mind that this was a “compromise” between Obama and the Republicans. The Democratic Congressional leaders were not part of this deal, and Obama had better get 100% support from the Republicans if he expects this thing to pass.
6 comments
I’m sorry, but this deal sucks. And Obama seems hardly even to have tried to improve it; instead, he spent his presser whining about how nasty liberals are to him.
As for the GOP, if every one of those bastards had to spend even one month living the way America’s newly poor live, … actually, no, they probably wouldn’t notice because they aren’t living paycheck to paycheck. Fcuk ’em, and I’m not offering to do the job.
What are you sorry about, Steve? This thing is an atrocity and Obama is blaming his failure to lead on everyone but himself.
He did this without the Dems, so let him get it passed. If I was Pelosi, I wouldn’t even schedule a vote. The Repubs are going to have to write and whip this sucker, and I see even less chance of a vote in the Senate.
Of course none of this matters a damn anyway if you weren’t lucky enough to have a job to lose.
One of the things I have noticed about Florida is that a lot of business have a habit of firing people just before they get in the three months that would qualify they for unemployment. The local Republicans really are pining for slavery.
Bryan, when I was working for a pizza establishment in a state that established 30 hour per weeks as “full time” allowing unemployment pay, our managers were under orders to schedule nobody for more than 29 hours a week. And that was in the 80’s. Same old, same old…
Yep, screw the workers has become the rallying cry of many businesses, it has filled the void left when “the customer’s always right” was removed from management training manuals.