The Fortnightly Rant for July 16, 2010, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 254, No. 21, posted on Saturday, January 15, 2011.
There don’t seem to be an awful lot of opportunities out there for the average person right now, what with unemployment running at 9.3 percent and the Senate refusing to extend long-term unemployment benefits.
One golden opportunity, though, is hanging in plain sight, readily available to anyone who will take the trouble to grab it. Sadly, it won’t pay the rent or put food on the table. Sadder still, few will take advantage of it.
This is the best chance in more than a century to see exactly how the rich get richer while the weak ones fade.
First, Shoot the Wounded
Late last month Judd Gregg (NH) joined with 39 other Republican Senators and one Democrat to filibuster an extension of long-term jobless benefits for 1.3 million Americans. Then he took his July 4th recess.
Gregg had revealed the alleged thinking behind his vote in an interview on CNBC back in May: “[Y]ou’re starting to see growth and you’re clearly going to dampen the capacity of that growth if you basically keep an economy that encourages people to, rather than go out and look for work, to stay on unemployment.” [Emphasis added.]
Sen. Gregg’s lively imagination notwithstanding, this graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows how wrong he is. Things may be looking up for his pals on Wall Street, but there aren’t any jobs out there for people to turn up their noses at.
Lest anyone be tempted to nominate Sen. Gregg for Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” award, we offer this quote from Utah’s Sen. Orrin Hatch (R), explaining the reason he voted against extending unemployment compensation: “We should not be giving money to people who are just going to blow it on drugs.”
Welfare for the Rich
We don’t want to give the impression that GOP Senators are not generous. In fact, you could say that they have been generous to a fault. They’ve been backing tax cuts for the wealthy for decades. This graph shows who benefited from the tax cuts put in place since 2001.
In 2007, a person in the top one percent of earners got a tax break of $45,000 — enough to lift a family of nine people out of poverty. People making a million a year or more got nearly three times as much.
Naturally, people actually in poverty got a tax break too — they had to, otherwise Republicans couldn’t claim they’d lowered everybody’s taxes. For those in the bottom 20 percent of earners, the tax break for 2007 was twenty bucks.
While the Republicans have ruled out extending unemployment benefits — a pretty neat trick, since they’re in the minority in both houses of Congress — they have decided that the tax cuts should continue. Speaking to that point last week Sen. Gregg emphasized those making over $250,000 a year should be included in the cuts.
The Catfood Commission
Between our decades-old policy of giving tax cuts to the rich and our slightly-newer policy of putting multiple foreign wars on the Defense Department’s VISA card, it’s no surprise that the budget deficit is rather high right now. To reduce that deficit, a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform has been formed. Since the Commission’s name is long and ungainly and the only option under consideration seems to be the gutting of Social Security, it has been dubbed the Catfood Commission.
There are many reasons why the deficit is suddenly so important — 69,456,897 reasons, to be exact: the number of Americans who voted to put a Black Democrat in the White House.
It goes without saying that Gregg is a member of the Commission. He is perfectly suited for it — he’s the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, he’s a hereditary millionaire, and he’s got the demeanor of an exasperated funeral director.
Senator Gregg is retiring this fall. We suppose he’ll go home to Rye and yell at kids to get off his lawn. A host of Republicans are competing for a chance to take his place. We haven’t heard a single one of them attempting to repudiate his policies.