Adding insult to injury, the Bush administration, whose record on job creation is the worst of any president since the Great Depression, will allow 375,000 people to lose their unemployment benefits this week.
According to a devastating new report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, it will be the largest number of unemployed workers ever to lose their benefits without qualifying for additional aid. Making matters worse, the same report cited Labor Department data to suggest that nearly 2 million unemployed Americans are expected to be in the same situation by June.
Congress and the White House, of course, have the option of extending these benefits. Indeed, they agreed to do so in 2002. Now, however, they’ve decided to cut people off because, they argue, the expanding economy should make up the difference. (They apparently missed the news that a mere 1,000 jobs were created nationwide in December — an average on 20 jobs per state.)
For Republicans in Congress, unemployment benefits aren’t a high enough priority to warrant federal funding. When Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) recently sought unanimous consent for a vote on extending unemployment insurance benefits, the GOP blocked the effort.
An aide to Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.), who opposed Kennedy’s measure, told the Washington Post, “We’re in a deficit situation, and we need to be very careful about government expenditures.”
We are, of course, in an unprecedented deficit “situation,” which was caused by the very fiscal irresponsibility that lawmakers like John Ensign have shown for over three years. In fact, Ensign was one of the enthusiastic Republicans who backed Bush’s tax cut plan, which will cost the government $264 billion in 2004 alone — forty times the cost of extending unemployment benefits.
And unlike the tax cuts, extending these benefits has a small short-term cost which helps the economy, whereas the tax cuts have an enormous long-term cost that puts a drag on the economy.
I guess it’s all about priorities. If I’m hearing the Republicans right, those suffering in the worst job market in generations don’t deserve extended benefits, while millionaires and billionaires who enjoy windfalls from Bush’s tax cuts deserve every penny.