With a minority of Senators having blocked even an attempt at debate on the American Jobs Act, Senate leaders are moving individual provisions as stand-alone bills this week. And first up is a bill to put hundreds of thousands of teachers, firefighters and other employees back to work.
In a packed Senate conference room yesterday, a few hundred firefighters, nurses, teachers, police officers and their allies were joined by Vice President Joe Biden and legislative leaders to push for the bill. It’s a $35 billion measure that would send money to the states to help them save jobs that are right now disappearing thanks to short-sighted budget cuts. Sen. Harry Reid plans to put the bill up for a vote this week.
As Biden noted at yesterday’s rally, this isn’t a radical, ideological proposition. It’s common sense. It gives people paychecks and helps communities keep the services and protections they can’t afford to lose. “It’s not only about your needs, it’s about the public needs,” Biden told the enthusiastic crowd. “This is not very complicated…real people will get real relief, right now.”
(Surprise, surprise: Sen. Mitch McConnell is already gearing up to block the bill.)
The bill is completely paid for by a small 0.5% surtax on money earned after the first $1 million dollars. To put that in basic math, if a wealthy person has $1,000,010 in taxable income, the surcharge would raise their taxes by a nickel. “Everything is about priorities,” Biden aptly noted, saying that Senators could save nearly 400,000 jobs—or they could save millionaires a little bit on their tax bill. “This is so simple. Watch your senator. Watch him or her choose.”
Among those who spoke at yesterday’s rally were Rodney Barton, a retired Maryland police officer, and Cherine Akbari, a teacher from Oakland Park, Florida who got her pink slip on Teacher Appreciation Day. “I’m one of 1,400 teachers laid off in my district,” said Akbari. “I’m worried about losing my home, which I just bought thinking I could have a career in education. I’m worried for myself but I’m even more worried for my students.”
These layoffs hit communities in two ways. First, they obviously reduce cities and towns’ ability to provide for public safety and good education, which hurts everything from property values to the future earnings prospects of students. Second, it has the same economic impact as any other layoff: depriving local businesses of customers and throwing more and more people into competition for a too-small number of job openings.
As the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent notes, the Senators whose vote could be decisive here come from states where the number of jobs saved would be bigger than the number of people who would actually be hit by the tax. And polls overwhelmingly show support for modest increases on taxes on the very wealthiest and investments in jobs. Again: this is a no-brainer.
So what is it going to be, U.S. Senators? Go with the overwhelming public consensus and put people like Cherine back to work, or keep taxes on millionaires from inching up above their historic lows? It’s a sign of a deeply dysfunctional debate in Washington that this would be anything like a hard choice.
In addition to the bill to fund teachers and public safety workers, the Obama administration is also proposing as a stand-alone bill a program to help businesses hire veterans, another portion of the American Jobs Act.
Tags: Jobs, Joe Biden, Public Safety, Senate
(Originally posted on UnemployedWorkers.org by Mitchell Hirsch)
Despite a majority of Senators voting to take up debate of the American Jobs Act, a minority succeeded Tuesday in blocking the measure from even being considered. The bill includes several key job-creation and tax-relief provisions designed to boost a stalling economy, and programs to aid long-term unemployed workers, including a ban on discrimination against jobless workers in the job market, as well as the essential renewal of federal unemployment insurance programs.
Unless Congress reauthorizes the current federal benefit programs before the December 31st deadline, millions of workers and their families will be left without their primary means of support to buy food, pay the rent or mortgage, and cover their other most basic necessities.
Lawmakers are reportedly seeking to act on several key components of the jobs bill separately in coming weeks.
An estimated 1.8 million jobless workers will be cut-off from federal unemployment insurance in January alone if Congress fails to renew the benefit programs, according to a new report issued by the National Employment Law Project. This includes nearly 1.4 million unemployed workers already receiving federal unemployment insurance, among them nearly 650,000 who would face an immediate “hard” cut-off of Extended Benefits, as well as more than 430,000 unemployed workers laid off as recently as July who will exhaust their state unemployment benefits in January.
And those numbers may well go much higher, as unemployment remains persistently high and, in many states, rising. In July and August, a total of more than 1.5 million first payments of regular state unemployment insurance were reported.
Over the course of 2012, the Administration projects that at least six million workers will not have access to federal unemployment insurance if the program is not reauthorized. Ms. Dawn Deane, a 49-year-old mother of two from Philadelphia, who was laid off in late June of this year, is one of those workers in danger of losing access to federal benefits. Despite twenty years of professional human resource experience, Deane says her diligent search for new work has thus far been disappointing.
“The unemployment insurance is helping me manage and maintain my mortgage, utilities, and car payments—helping us just barely stay above water,” Deane says in the NELP report. “Without it, I’d just have nothing while I look for new work—not even heat, electricity, or a phone. And if it got cut off, I would fall behind on my mortgage, probably face foreclosure, have my car repossessed, and end up applying for welfare.”
Last week, Deane testified at a House subcommittee hearing, urging lawmakers to renew the federal unemployment insurance programs through next year.
NELP’s report, “Hanging on by a Thread,” warns that a lapse or cut in the federal unemployment insurance programs would deal devastating blows to jobless workers, struggling businesses, and the fragile U.S. economy.
“For millions of out-of-work Americans hanging on by a thread, unemployment insurance is the only thing preventing a free-fall into destitution and despair,” said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project. “For struggling businesses and the halting economy, unemployment insurance is what’s preserving consumer spending at a moment we need it most. Withdrawing this crucial stimulus would likely tip the nation back into recession.”
Since the data were first reported in 1948, the nation has never experienced the record stretch of high unemployment and long-term joblessness that now plagues the economy. Congress has never cut back on federally-funded unemployment insurance when unemployment was anywhere near this high for this long. The highest unemployment rate when federal benefits were cut by Congress was in 1985, at 7.2 percent. Today, the unemployment rate stands at 9.1 percent.
Currently, the unemployment rate has been above 8.5 percent for more than 31 months, and for nearly two years, over 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work for more than six months.
The report highlights other factors that favor prompt passage of the federal extension of unemployment insurance through 2012:
- Due largely to the federal extension, in 2010, unemployment insurance kept 3.2 million people (including nearly one million children) from falling into poverty. Were it not for unemployment insurance, the number of people falling into poverty would have more than doubled in 2010.
- The federal unemployment insurance programs have saved or created millions of jobs since first enacted in July 2008, including more than 1.1 million jobs in the fourth quarter of 2009 alone.
- Recent research and two new state surveys strongly indicate that workers who are receiving unemployment insurance are more likely, not less, to stay in the labor market and actively seek work despite dim prospects for reemployment.
“With our economy so fragile, long-term unemployment so high, and the job market so weak, the stakes could not be greater or the consequences of inaction more severe,” NELP’s Owens said.
“We are mired in a national crisis of long-term unemployment. Not since the Great Depression have so many people been out of work for so long. This is not the time to cut back on federal unemployment insurance.”
Tags: Jobs, Senate, unemployment, unemployment extension
“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell
“Obama is on the ropes; why do we appear ready to hand him a win?”
-Senior House Republican Aide, speaking anonymously
Forty-six Republican Senators voted against a motion that would start debate on the American Jobs Act.
This isn’t a vote on the bill itself, mind you. Even though the American Jobs Act contains provisions supported by both Republicans and Democrats in the past, and even though unemployment remains unchanged at 9.1 percent, almost half the U.S. Senate doesn’t even want to have a debate about it.
You don’t need a political analyst on TV to tell you why this happened. Mitch McConnell has laid it out for us. Their priority – “the single most important thing,” in McConnell’s words – is to defeat President Obama in the 2012 election.
Not the economy, not jobs, and not getting American workers off the couch and out of the unemployment line. Defeating one person in one election is their goal. Everything else be damned; that includes nearly allowing our country to default on our debt, keeping unemployment high by laying off public sector workers to offset private sector growth, or manufacturing crisis after crisis to keep the attention of Congress away from the economy.
Senate Republicans aren’t in Washington to serve you, the 99 Percent. They are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the 1 Percent.
Or should we say less than 1 Percent? Publicly, a big GOP objection to the American Jobs Act was Senator Reid’s proposal to pay for it through a 5.6 percent surcharge on adjusted gross incomes exceeding $1 million. According to a study by Citizens for Tax Justice, this affects 0.2 percent of Americans.
In other words, last night, Senate Republicans showed they are on the side of the super-wealthy, the 0.2 percent, and it doesn’t matter one bit that 99.8 percent of us are suffering.
Tags: Jobs, Senate
As Biden noted at yesterday’s rally, this isn’t a radical, ideological proposition. It’s common sense. It gives people paychecks and helps communities keep the services and protections they can’t afford to lose. “It’s not only about your needs, it’s about the public needs,” Biden told the enthusiastic crowd. “This is not very complicated…real people will get real relief, right now.”
