5 Times George W. Bush Extended Unemployment Insurance Benefits

[boutons_deux]

In his December 14, 2002 weekly radio address, President George W. Bush reminded Congress that “no final bill was sent to me extending unemployment benefits for about 750,000 Americans whose benefits will expire on December 28th.”

The unemployment rate today is 7.0 percent and at the end of this year 1.3 million Americans — including 20,000 veterans — who have been out of work for more than six months will have their unemployment insurance benefits cut off. Republicans in Congress have refused to extend these benefits, though the Congressional Budget Office predicts failing to do so will cost the economy 200,000 jobs.

The extended unemployment benefits Congress is about to let expire actually began under George W. Bush, long after his 2003 extension expired as unemployment dipped below 5 percent again. In 2008, as the financial crisis began to rock the economy, President Bush signed an extension of 13 weeks, 39 weeks total in most states, for anyone living in a state with unemployment over 6.0 percent. He also signed unemployment extensions that specifically helped the victims of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

All five times Bush extended unemployment benefits, he did so with the majority of Republicans in Congress supporting him.

At the peak of the crisis, when unemployment was around 10 percent, Congress and President Obama extended benefits to 99 weeks. The current maximum is 73 weeks.

A requirement of receiving benefits is seeking a new job, but with an estimated three people out of work for every one job opening, cutting off benefits likely won’t encourage jobseekers — as Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) imagines — but instead doom them to permanent unemployment. And the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) estimates that the 1.3 million who will be cut off in 2014 will soon swell to 5 million.

http://www.nationalmemo.com/5-times-george-w-bush-extended-unemployment-insurance-benefits/

[boutons_deux]

Demand for Food Stamps Soars as Cuts Sink in and Shelves Empty


Deep cuts to the US food stamps programme, designed to keep low-income Americans out of hunger in the aftermath of the economic recession, have forced increasing numbers of families such as theirs to rely on food banks and community organisations to stave off hunger.

An expansion of the programme, put in place when the recession was biting deepest, wasallowed to expire in November, cutting benefits for an estimated 48 million people, including 22 million children, by an average of 7%.

As these cuts begin to bite, even harsher reductions are in prospect. Republicans in the House of Representatives have proposed $38bn cuts over 10 years, in their latest version of a long-delayed farm bill that would also require new work requirements and drug tests for food stamp recipients.

The cuts have forced poor families to make tough choices. The Guardian spoke to beneficiaries of the food stamps scheme, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme (Snap), in San Antonio, Texas. As the second most populous US state after California, Texas suffered the second-biggest cut to its Snap programme, affecting 4 million recipients.

At the San Antonio Food Bank, where she comes for help with her resume and to register for its work force program, Acosta, 36, a mother of four children aged 14 and under, described how being laid off from her job as a healthcare administrator seven months ago had caused an immediate family crisis.

Last month, the need for emergency food in this community soared to its highest level yet, according to Joe Guinn, a minister at the church. He shakes his head in disbelief as he recalls last month. "There were 260 families, that's almost 1,500 people," said Guinn. "Our absolute highest ever."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...mericans-texas


Conservative class warfare policies, going back to St Ronnie's "Welfare Queens in Cadillacs", create and then screw America's unemployed and working poor underclass.

This time, the ing weak-ass Dems should shut down the govt while demanding extenesion of unemployment benefits. They would have had at least a morally defensible position AND widespread support from the 99%.


Republicans could face serious backlash over unemployment benefit expiration

Congressional Republicans returned home for the holidays with empty stockings for cons uents who are suffering with long-term unemployment, after the GOP repeatedly blocked renewal of the federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation fund. Now a new poll shows their stinginess could create a significant backlash at the polls next year — including from some Republican voters.

Public Policy Polling (PPP) took a look at four Republican-occupied swing districts in the House, as well as the district of House Speaker John Boehner. Bipartisan majorities of voters in each district supported extending long-term unemployment benefits:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2013/12/23/republicans-could-face-serious-backlash-over-unemployment-benefit-expiration/

Repugs ignoring polls in Repugs districts to kowtow to their ALEC/VWRC/UCA employers.

[boutons_deux]

Merry Christmas From the GOP: Unemployment Benefits End for 1.3 Million Families

hree days after Christmas, unemployment benefits end for 1.3 million people who have exhausted their state unemployment benefits, but still can't find a job.

To be eligible for unemployment benefits, you have to be actively looking for a job. Virtually all of these people would rather work, but can't find a job in today's economy where there are three applicants for every job available.

But when the budget deal was negotiated in Congress over the last several weeks, Republican negotiators refused to agree to continue those unemployment benefits. And at the same time, they demanded the continuation of tax breaks for big oil companies and loopholes for Wall Street billionaires who get their income from hedge funds.

Our income per capita - and our productivity per person - has increased by 80% over the last 30 years. But over those same 30 years, average incomes for most Americans were stagnant - and virtually all of that increased income and wealth went to the top 1%.

Many on the right are so out of touch with ordinary Americans that they argue that providing unemployment benefits makes people "dependent." This of course completely ignores the fact that to qualify you have to have been working and lost your job for no fault of your own; you have to be actively looking for work; and the maximum benefits in many states are very low.

Ask the Koch brothers to support a family on the $258 per week maximum benefit in Louisiana, or the $275 per week maximum benefit in Florida - or even the $524 per week maximum benefit in Ohio.

You have to be from another planet to believe that most people will become "dependent" on a total income of $275 per week.

Those who receive unemployment benefits spend virtually every dime on the goods and services they need to live. That spending provides jobs to thousands of other Americans. So cutting federal unemployment benefits will actually create a quarter million more people who are unemployed. Great work GOP.

http://readersupportednews.org/opini...llion-families

[boutons_deux]

Women Are Swelling the Ranks of People Living in Extreme Poverty in America

Since the Great Recession of 2008, the food stamp program — now calledSNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), has doubled from $38 billion in 2008 to $78 billion in the last year. During 2012, 65 million Americans used SNAP for at least one a month, which means that one out of every five Americans became part of the swelling rolls of “needy families,” most of whom are women and children.

Democrats defend the new debit card program, which can only be used to purchase food, as feeding needy Americans at a time of high unemployment and great poverty. Republicans, for their part, argue that the programme is rife with fraud, that its recipients (who are mostly single mothers) are lazy and shiftless, and that we must make drastic cuts to reduce government spending. Their most ensian argument is that if you feed the poor, they won’t want to work.

On Nov. 1, 2013, Congresscut nearly five billion dollars from SNAP and Republicans now want to cut another $40 billion dollars. The stalemate has resulted in the failure of Congress to pass the farm bill, which provides SNAP subsidies to farms, mostly of which are large agricultural corporations.

The words “women” or even “mothers” rarely appear. In a powerful column against the cuts, the liberal and compassionate New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, for example, argued that “two-thirds of recipients are children, elderly or disabled” and warned his readers about the long-range impact of malnourished children. He, too, never mentioned women, who are the main adult recipients of the SNAP program and who feed those children, elderly or disabled. Nor did he point out that those who apply for such assistance are the mothers and women who seek to nourish these children. It’s as though women are simply vehicles — not persons — in the reproduction process of the human race.

Yet the reality tells a different story. In 2010, for example, 42 percent of single mothers relied on SNAP; and in rural areas, the rate often rose as high as one half of all single mothers. What’s missing from this picture — on both sides — is the real faces of hunger, which is not “needy” families, or “poor Americans", but single mothers with “food insecurity” for themselves and their families. According to the Center for Budget Priorities, women are twice as likely to use food stamps as anyone else in the population.

These women are either unemployed, under-employed or service workers who don’t earn enough to feed themselves and their families. By the end of the month, they and their children frequently often skip meals or eat one meal a day until the next month’s SNAP assistant arrives

poor women remain invisible, even as the mothers who feed the children, teenagers, elderly and disabled who live with them

The result is that we are turning poor, single mothers, who are 85 percent of all single parents, into a newly invisible and undeserving group of recipients.

Republicans may view single mothers as sinful parasites who don’t deserve food assistance. But behind every hungry child, teenager and elderly person is a hungry mother who is exhausted from trying to keep her family together. Women who receive food assistance are neither invisible nor undeserving. They are working-class heroes who work hard — often at several minimal wage jobs — to keep their families nourished and together.

http://www.alternet.org/gender/war-w...age=1#bookmark

[The Reckoning]

why do you love bush so much and hate america?

[boutons_deux]

Guns, not butter

Maintaining Nuclear Arsenal To Cost $355 Billion

"The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost to maintain and modernize nuclear forces over the next decade will be $355 billion, including $221 billion for Defense Department programs to sustain strategic and tactical strike systems as well as nuclear command, control, communications and early warning systems.

CBO estimates that between fiscal years 2014 and 2023, that the Obama administration’s $297 billion nuclear forces plan will incur $59 billion in cost growth, or 19 percent.


According to the report, the Defense Department over the next decade will require $136 billion for strategic and tactical delivery systems and $56 billion for nuclear command, control and communications as well as early warning systems, while the Energy Department will spend $105 billion on the nuclear weapons enterprise.

A 19% growth rate to build new systems to deliver Armageddon as Congress claims they can’t find anything in the defense budget to cut – though they do have endless imagination for plotting attacks on Social Security, Medicare, and the social safety net."

It becomes more obvious each day that the priorities of the DC elite are wildly out of step with those of the American people.

http://news.firedoglake.com/2013/12/...t-355-billion/

[Susan Boyle]

boutons_deux with the "Truth Bombs!"

[boutons_deux]

18 Of America's Biggest Companies Using Tax Havens To Skirt $92 Billion In U.S. Taxes

At least 18 companies, including Nike, Microsoft and Apple, are stashing profits in offshore tax havens likely in a bid to avoid paying taxes, according to a new report from the Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-leaning research group. If the companies brought that money home, they would pay combined more than $92 billion in U.S. taxes,

Apple came under fire last month after a Senate hearing revealed that the company paid just 2 percent in taxes on $74 billion in profits by housing its money in an Irish subsidiary that hadn’t declared its tax residency anywhere in the world. Apple CEO Tim Cook told lawmakers that the company pays “all the taxes we owe,”

Companies like Apple are able to use loopholes to legally keep their money in other countries, and they don’t have to pay U.S. taxes on that money unless it comes back home. When a corporation brings money stashed abroad back to the U.S., it pays the difference between what was already paid in taxes to the country where the money was previously held and the top U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent.
The companies on CTJ’s list disclosed in their filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that if they brought their overseas profits back to the U.S. they would pay a tax rate above 30 percent, indicating that the countries where their money is currently housed have very low tax rates.

“When you see somebody estimated that we'd pay 30 percent or even 35 percent when we bring these profits back, that is an indirect admission that they’ve paid nothing,” Gardner said. “There’s a very small number of countries in which you can pay single digits in taxes on your profits -- and those countries have an awful lot of beach front.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3378935.html

[boutons_deux]

Republicans Move to Reclaim Poverty-Fighting Mantle

the message from Republicans in Congress is that the government has foundered in its efforts to address the problem.

Mindful of polls that show many Americans see them as detached from or indifferent to the hardships faced by the people most affected by the recession and slow recovery, Republicans have begun to speak publicly on the issue of poverty and to propose their own, more market-based solutions.

Republicans are offering a series of proposals to help more Americans rise out of poverty: attaching or reinstating work requirements to safety-net programs, streamlining federal offices, improving training and education initiatives, and offering tax breaks to the needy. what happend to "skin in the game"


legislation that would give states more control of Medicaid funds block grants to pay for tax breaks to the the wealth and corps!

“economic freedom zones” with reduced taxes and regulations. Tried in CA, failed, nothing but tax cuts for corporations, no job creation.

“There’s also a recognition among a lot of Republicans that we have not done a good job messaging conservatism, messaging the fact that we are conservatives not in spite of our concern for the poor, but because of it,” yes, better mesaging!

president has defined poverty and income inequality as the defining issue of our time, and his solution is to raise taxes on wealthy Americans and raise the minimum wage to $10.10” an hour, Mr. Rubio said. “That’s not a solution. $10.10 is not the American dream. I want them making $50.”

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/01/09...?from=homepage

House Repugs will block, not even vote on, extending long-term unemployment payments.

and we know how many JOBS PROGRAMS the Repugs have passed!

[boutons_deux]

GOP is losing on unemployment insurance — and running scared

Newly assertive Democrats force Republicans to scramble to defend their insurance-cutting cruelty to the unemployed

It’s way too early to declare victory on extending unemployment insurance benefits to the long-term jobless.

It faces real trouble in John Boehner’s House, where the tanned and rested speaker returned from his long vacation telling Democrats they’ll have to cut other safety-net programs to pay for it.

But it’s worth noting how much Democrats have already changed the UI debate. Republicans have gone from flat refusals to extend long-term unemployment to insisting they’ll consider an extension, as long as it’s paid for. That’s progress worth acknowledging.

Sure, Congress extended UI 14 of 17 times without finding funds to pay for it, including five times under George W. Bush. The party’s recent extremism on unemployment insurance is just another measure of how far it has shifted right in the last five years. But Democrats’ new boldness on issues of economic populism and income inequality has Republicans scrambling for a politically palatable reply – on UI as well as the larger issue of poverty and opportunity.

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/07/gop_...unning_scared/

Repugs would love to PAY-FOR extending UI by cutting taxes on wealthy and corps

[Nbadan]

[Nbadan]

[Wild Cobra]

This was just the next year after the recessions started. How long has this current recession been going on?

[Wild Cobra]

You don't understand this either, do you?

early congresses didn't meet nearly as long as ours do today. Our congress members are suppose to spend most their time in their home districts, spending time with their cons uents...

Get a grip, Dan...

[boutons_deux]

This was just the next year after the recessions started. How long has this current recession been going on?

[boutons_deux]

You don't understand this either, do you?

early congresses didn't meet nearly as long as ours do today. Our congress members are suppose to spend most their time in their home districts, spending time with their cons uents...

Get a grip, Dan...

goddam you're stupid.

In a increasingly complex country and society of 300M+ people, adding 1M+ more per year, the WORK AND PROGRESS by Congress, the days they spend in Congress building, are much more demanding than 200+ years ago.

[Wild Cobra]

LOL...

You think that makes any kind of point?

[Wild Cobra]

goddam you're stupid.

In a increasingly complex country and society of 300M+ people, adding 1M+ more per year, the WORK AND PROGRESS by Congress, the days they spend in Congress building, are much more demanding than 200+ years ago.

Only because they try to control us too much. I'm happy when they aren't there. they can't anything up when they aren't in session.

[boutons_deux]

Six Years from Its Beginning, the Great Recession’s Shadow Looms Over the Labor Market

http://www.epi.org/publication/years...ssions-shadow/

The jobs aren't there. The sociopathic Repugs cutting public assistance, aka austerity, won't create the missing jobs, won't push all those imagined welfare queens, surfer dudes, Big Lebowskis into jobs, and will in fact KILL JOBS and reduce GDP.

[boutons_deux]

LOL...

You think that makes any kind of point?

goddam you're stupid

the point, to which your ideology blinds you, is the jobs aren't there

[boutons_deux]

[Wild Cobra]

goddam you're stupid

the point, to which your ideology blinds you, is the jobs aren't there

Yet leaches like you will not help address the real problems.

Fact is, we are too close to less people pulling the cart than are riding in it.

this has to stop, and since you are not attempting to be part of the solution, you are part of the problem...

[Wild Cobra]

Boo hoo...

Cry baby cry...

[boutons_deux]

Yet leaches like you will not help address the real problems.

Fact is, we are too close to less people pulling the cart than are riding in it.

this has to stop, and since you are not attempting to be part of the solution, you are part of the problem...

goddam, you're stupid yawn

[Wild Cobra]

goddam, you're stupid yawn

You are stupid for comparing Obama to Bush.