Main Street

Jobless Benefits Extension: Bunning Has Company

Earlier today we reported that Jim Bunning is blocking the much-needed unemployment insurance extension because of a dispute over how it would be funded.

That’s his reason for cutting off (at least temporarily) a lifeline to more than a million people.

Arizona Senator Jon Kyl has a different reason: He’ll be holding America’s job-seekers hostage to the interests of America’s multi-millionaires, blocking the extension of unemployment benefits until he gets an estate tax bill he likes; namely, one that benefits the very wealthy.

This is a fairly shocking admission of priorities. 1.1 million workers are scheduled to have their unemployment benefits expire in the next month, with 2.7 million on track to lose them by April, while unemployment is still at 9.7 percent and there are six unemployed workers for every job opening. 6.3 million Americans have been unemployed for six months or longer, which is the most since the government began keeping track in 1948 and “more than double the toll in the next-worst period, in the early 1980s.” Yet Kyl is willing to hold unemployment benefits hostage in order to fashion a tax cut for heirs of the very wealthiest estates.

Due to a Bush-era budgeting gimmick, the estate tax is currently expired, but it is set to come back in 2011 at the Clinton-era level, which Kyl has an intense interest in preventing. His proposal to slash the estate tax rate and increase its exemption would cost $250 billion over ten years, with 99 percent of the benefit going to the heirs of multi-millionaires. Under 2009 law, only 0.2 percent of estates are subject to the estate tax at all.

This is just unbelievably despicable. Kyl is willing to cut off the meager benefits keeping struggling families afloat in order to benefit the wealthiest 0.2% of people, while costing the government money. In Kyl’s home state of Arizona, 28,832 people will lose their benefits in March, a number that will rise to 120,166 by June.

Give Sen. Kyl a call, why don’t you, and ask why he’s holding struggling job-seekers hostage to the interests of people who already have so much money they will never need to work. Kyl’s office phone number is (202) 224-4521. Call now.

Tags: Jim Bunning, Jon Kyl, unemployment