Washington Republicans Kill Jobs Bill, Prevent Money to Avoid Layoffs for Public Workers
Republicans in the U.S. Senate killed a jobs bill last week, using arcane Senate rules to prevent the bill from even being debated on the Senate floor.
The bill, HR4213, “American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act,” would have appropriated $24 billion to the states to avoid layoffs for state and local government workers, as well as extending unemployment benefits like health care for workers unemployed due to the Wall Street recession. To pay for the bill, tax loopholes used by corporrations like Verizon to avoid paying sales taxes were closed, investment fund managers would have been required to pay income taxes at the same level people like you do (right now, income of millionaire investment fund managers--the people who caused the recession with their speculation and gambling--is taxed at a much lower rate than yours), and some was added to the deficit.
Republicans used a number of arguments to try to tell the public why they wouldn't even allow a vote on a bill to create jobs in a recession. Some said that unemployment benefits make people lazy. The Republican leader of the House compared the economic recession to something the size of an ant. Ben Nelson, a Democrat from Nebraska, joined every Republican in voting to ensure that the income of investment fund managers is taxed lower than yours. Apparently, taxing your income is just fine, but discouraging Wall Street speculation by taxing the income of investment fund managers would be, ahem, disastrous for the economy.
And then there were fears that this would add to the debt. That's right: the people who voted for George W Bush's multi-trillion dollar tax cut for the wealthy, the people who gleefully led us into a trillion dollar war in the Middle East, are now worried about the debt. They were more than happy to spend $800 billion of your dollars to help the banks when the banks were hurting, but spending $40 billion of the banks' dollars to help you now that you're hurting is completely out of the question.
And not only are they threatening the jobs of every public worker in the country by refusing to allow aid to states to keep public workers on the job, they are doing it at the very time when the deficits states are facing threatens a double-dip recession, as jobs public jobs are more vital than ever to protect the fragile economic recovery we are on the verge of.
At least we're in uncharted waters with this "double-dip recession" stuff, right? Well, actually, the U.S. was on the road to recoevery during the Great Depression. FDR's New Deal was stimulating investment and spending in the economy, and things were getting better. And that's when conservatives persuaded him to abandon much of his spending and cut back--based on fears of the deficit. The resulting cuts sent the U.S. into several more years of Depression.
The conservatives and the pro-corporate types of the world don't seem to learn very quickly, but you sure can give them credit for one thing: they are amazingly consistent.
