UPDATED: The Benefits Are Restored, But At What Cost?

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Update is below

Ladies and gentlemen, the wait is finally over.  Today, unemployment benefits are on the verge of finally being reauthorized after nearly two months of the nation’s unemployed having nothing to rely on other than whatever savings they might have had left.  Technically, the benefits have not been restored, but with today’s successful cloture vote in the Senate, passage is essentially guaranteed.  Once again, the vote split along party lines, with the exception of Senator Ben Nelson (D-Nebraska) joining the attempt to maintain the filibuster, and Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins siding with the Democrats.  We know tonight the cost of the legislation, and other important specifics, so the “cost” in my title is of course beyond the actual dollar amount.

Chances are, some of you out there are looking to this post to find out the specific details of the benefit renewal.  Just about every major news outlet is reporting on it, but that is because of the nearly 2.5 million unemployed Americans themselves, and the partisanship in the Senate that has blocked action up until now.  According to ABC News, the package as a whole adds about $34 billion to the deficit (remember that figure, I’ll come back to that a bit later), and would do just about what everyone expected it would; thanks to today’s action, all the missed checks these last six weeks will be repaid, benefits up to 99 weeks will continue until November at an average of $335 each, and the long-term unemployed who have used up all 99 weeks are left out in the cold.  Of course, the damage has already been done, and now we must look around and take stock of what has happened.

As the Dust Settles…

We can place the cause of the interruption on the intense partisanship that just seems to get worse with each piece of legislation.  However this is something that we’re all getting used to by now, unfortunately.  What’s new is the view that some people in Congress have just simply gone insane; twisted by their own fervent ideologies, reality just doesn’t appear to make any sense to these individuals.  The most obvious example of this is the now-common belief that the extended unemployment benefits, just a little more than a month short of two years of Federal unemployment benefits in addition to the 26 weeks provided by states, is an incentive for the unemployed to simply be lazy.  I ranted about this in a previous post on unemployment, but everyone loves a good rant, so here we go again: no matter how you work the numbers, 5 applicants on average for every available position means that 4 of those 5 job seekers will still be unemployed.

That doesn’t even account for the “skill gap” pointed out by the New York Times a short time ago, where companies want to hire, and hire aggressively in order to expand, but the applicants just don’t have the necessary skills.  But I digress; another example of the insanity that has taken over on Capitol Hill is the apparent Republican belief that even though extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans would add roughly 20 times the amount of money to the deficit over ten years as extending unemployment, the GOP believes that that is the way to be fiscally responsible while stimulating the economy.

This is simply ridiculous.  Heck, if I felt like finding one, I would embed a YouTube clip of that classic circus music right here.  I mean really, the only way that this idea even remotely makes sense is if you are a big-time CEO.  They may have the money to throw around come election season, but ultimately the little guys matter just as much.  Last I checked, there were more little guys than CEO’s who had a member of Congress in their pocket; you know what you should do in November.  We got the unemployment benefits back for a while, but now a ‘fifth tier’ of benefits going beyond 99 weeks is all but dead in the water.  The clash over the benefits also reveals that it’s going to be a tough fight on the rest of the agenda for this year and beyond, regardless of whether the Democrats remain in control of Congress.  Thank God the legislation pushes the next renewal fight until after the election.

UPDATE:

Man, Senate Republicans just don’t know when to give up.  Cloture votes, unfortunately, do not directly lead to a vote on the bill itself; there can be up to 30 hours of further debate following a successful cloture vote, and Senate Republicans took full advantage of that today.  Seriously, they should have just let it go, as the attempt to throw in several random amendments that were solely intended to either a) serve their own interest, or, more likely in my opinion, b) to attempt to make the bill unsavory enough to defeat.  Either way, the amendments took up valuable time that the Senate could have used on other legislation, and it’s not even going to work other than to cause an annoyance.  Further, this ploy by the Republicans proves that they absolutely do not care about the unemployed, or even the nation’s average people.  What’s more, they keep repeating the same lines about caring about these people.  Now we know it’s a lie.

The UPDATED: The Benefits Are Restored, But At What Cost? by The New Age of Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Tags: 99 weeks, Ben Nelson, Bush tax cuts, Congress, Olympia Snowe, partisanship, Politics, Republican, Senate, Susan Collins, Tier 5, Unemployment benefits, United States, United States Congress