Congress knew it needed to pass a bill to extend unemployment benefits. We are in the midst of a Great Recession that has toppled families by cutting jobs, putting public employees on "furlough" and cut back hours for those who still have jobs. For some states, like Michigan, the blood is everywhere. The toll in terms of human suffering is enormous, and has a cascading effect. As laid off workers cut back spending, small businesses suffer and themselves face catastrophic losses. The more are hurt, the more get hurt. The Big Banks may be back to their same old games--speculating like crazy with other people's money, high leverage, and even info borrowed from their customers (cf. flash trading) and raking in big bonuses for their activity--but Main Street is still hurting from the economic disaster brought on by the Banks' speculation.
So we need to extend unemployment benefits. A person that was laid off last November who supports a family of four may have been able to get an odd job or two, but may be unemployable in this economy. If we, his collective neighbors, don't come to his rescue, what happens will be bad. Violence and crime are possible. Degradation and reliance on individual and group charity is unavoidable. So we need to extend unemployment benefits.
I wish, just once, that Congress could pass the bill that needs to be passed without larding it with giveaways for their lobbyist cronies and the lobbied-for industries. As noted in a recent post on the homebuyer tax credit extension and expansion, the unemployment benefits, which cost very little and are considered a great spur to economic growth, would only be about $2 billion. But the giveaway to huge multinational and other large firms that made oodles of money several years ago but happened to lose some in 2008 or 2009 is huge--about $10 billion. And those kinds of provisions (a smaller version of which was included in the stimulus package earlier) don't do much to stimulate.
Doggett said it all in a speech on the floor of the House today. The remarks (distributed by his office staff) are excerpted below.
This bill represents a textbook example of how not to deal with the economic challenges that our country faces. While previously approved by the House solely to address the needs of the unemployed in America's most economically depressed areas at a cost of $1.4 billion, the Senate has taken the good work of Chairman McDermott, delayed it, and mushroomed this bill's cost to $24 billion.
Economists advise that every dollar we invest here on unemployment benefits spurs economic growth (GDP) by $1.61 cents--very effective, a winner.
But the corporate giveaway added to this bill--the so-called 'loss carryback provision'--yields, according to the same economist, 19 cents for every dollar we invest--a real loser.
After noting that the bill rewards $10 billion to some of the same corporations that "brought us to the brink of economic ruin" Doggett asks:
If this is such a great idea, why don't we first apply loss carryback to workers, who have lost their jobs[?] Give them a rebate check for a big chunk of whatever they paid in taxes when they had a job? That would certainly be more [stimulative] than asking some corporations to pay nothing for our national security.
Right on, Doggett. You remind me a little bit of Paul Wellstone. If only we had more people in Congress willing to talk truth to power, we might be able to unseat these financial megacompanies from their protected perches, as well as the corporate lobbyists that are able to get Congress to do tricks on command for their corporate bosses. If Congress really wants to turn this country around, it cannot continue to apply an economic understanding that looks only to providing what they want to the big corporations, no matter the result to ordinary Americans.
Excellent, Linda : )
Posted by: Raza | November 05, 2009 at 02:44 PM