Brief Thoughts: The Deficit Needs to be Dealt With, but So Does Unemployment

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As part of the changes I’m making this summer to the blog, I’m adding a new type of writing, Brief Thoughts, which is obviously intended to be, well, briefer than a normal post.  The reason behind this is that while yes, I love writing the longer posts and I have a lot to say about the issues of our time,  I recognize in this fast-paced world we live in that a lot of you might like something more bite-sized to digest while waiting for that YouTube video to load, or in a commercial break during your favorite show.  Okay, that may be overstating the briefness of this new type of post, but you get the idea.  In the future, look for those two words in the headline of a post for one that you can read, comment on, and get back to your show while having only missed the car dealers screaming at you.  In keeping with the spirit of it, I’ll jump right in to tonight’s post.

Today, we saw a repeat of what happened the last few months with regard to the special extensions to unemployment benefits; on Tuesday, millions of Americans will, once again, see an interruption in their unemployment checks thanks to Congress balking at extending the measures that were intended to only be temporary.  At least this time, there is a justification for the time delay that had the House of Representatives voting on it after the Senate had already gone home for the Memorial Day recess.  Unfortunately for those Americans who need those checks, a Congressional recess for a holiday such as Memorial Day is, of course, a full week off.  Anyway, the rationale for the delay this time is the realization among legislators in both the House and the Senate that we need to do something about the deficit.  It is great to hear that Congress has finally found religion on deficit spending, but they are going about it the wrong way.

Sure, the bill passed, and the Senate is expected to take up- and pass- their form of this legislation immediately following the break, but the resistance to new spending has created issues for the newly-unemployed.  Here’s the gist of the effect of the provisions that were killed in the name of fiscal responsibility: if you just lost your job, do not wait a minute longer to start getting your unemployment benefits.  According to US News and World Report, those Americans who have already used their six months of state-provided benefits will start losing access to their Federal benefits.  More damaging is the fact that the House has also voted to cut off the popular subsidy intended to help with paying for health insurance.  That’s right folks, the COBRA subsidy is no longer accepting new beneficiaries; fortunately those already on it will keep it.  While these are the major red flags in the new bill, there are more spending cuts involved.  Further, the Huffington Post reports that Speaker Pelosi has definitively ruled out a Tier 5 to Federal unemployment benefits; once you hit 99 weeks, that’s it.

Okay, I could understand these measures, especially with the debt crisis in Europe bringing our own national debt to the forefront.  However, there are better ways to address the deficit than kicking those who are already down.  The US News and World Report article reveals something that should be disgusting to just about all of us.  The special interests got their handouts in the form of tax breaks to NASCAR tracks, biodiesel producers, and other industries; what ever happened to the “no more earmarks in 2010″ pledges we heard on both sides of the aisle earlier this year?  I agree with the need to encourage alternative fuels, and biodiesel is one of the more promising ones, at least until someone manages to invent a better alternative, but to give them the subsidy at the same time as people’s unemployment benefits are getting cut?

Let’s not even go into the NASCAR tax break; whoever got that piece inserted deserves to lose his seat in November.  How many jobs does that create?  Further, that sport is not even that interesting until the final 15 minutes of a race anyway!  This recession has tested the limits of the social safety net established during the Great Depression and over the following seventy years, especially since we have more and more people reaching the 99 week limit, simply because there aren’t that many jobs out there.  If Congress seems so out-of-touch with the harsh reality of millions of Americans desperately looking for work many months after they lost their jobs, why not give a few Congressmen, and maybe some Senators, a taste of those difficulties?

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• Tier 5: The Despair Of The 99ers (huffingtonpost.com)
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• Why Deficit Hawks Are Killing The Recovery (tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com)
• The Manufactured Deficit Crisis (trueslant.com)
• Guillotines And Green / Tea Party Thinking (seeingtheforest.com)

The Brief Thoughts: The Deficit Needs to be Dealt With, but So Does Unemployment by The New Age of Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Tags: 99ers, Brief Thoughts, COBRA, earmarks, fiscal responsibility, House of Representatives, jobs, Nancy Pelosi, Politics, tax breaks, Tier 5, Unemployment benefits, United States Congress