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The months and months of effort put into a bill that won’t create much of anything in the way of jobs – more of a bill to stave off more disaster than anything – is a perfect model for a dysfunctional legislative system. To recap, the Senate passed a $154 billion package back in December that included a lot of the elements in this current jobs bill. The House broke it apart, passed a small piece of it (which did become law) and then passed another piece in March. The informal conference committee produced another bill which ballooned back up as high as $200 billion. Then Blue Dogs decided to strip out provisions that would maintain health care for the poor and the jobless and deliver aid to the states. Now, the Senate is putting them back in. And we’re nearly six months from that original vote, and the two chambers seem diametrically opposed on their priorities, with no end in sight.
Months have already been consumed on this bill, and new Senate changes mean the unwieldy package will have to go back to the House, which only narrowly passed its version before Memorial Day. But revenue deals at the expense of the oil industry now unite most Democrats, and the restoration of $24 billion in state aid is a calculated gamble to bring governors off the sidelines and ask senators to support the bill and forestall deeper budget cuts and layoffs at home.
After a party luncheon Tuesday, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) gave a qualified “I think so” answer to the question of passage. “The issue is to get a few Republicans to vote for it,” Schumer told POLITICO. “The Republican governors, some of them seem to be energized. Whether it translates into votes, we’ll see.”
I don’t know if that matters, if you can’t then get enough Blue Dogs to back it in the House. And by the way, they’re only adding the Medicaid part. Jobless workers who were getting a subsidy on unaffordable COBRA costs? They’re out of luck, that will be offered as an amendment but it has little chance of passage.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats tinkered with the carried interest proposal, lowering the cost to money managers from the bill and using fees on Big Oil to offset it. At that point, you’re just trading one set of rich people for another, but the fact that you just cannot get enormously wealthy people to fairly pay their share of tax rates is really astounding.
WASHINGTON—Senate Democrats unveiled a proposal to raise taxes on investment fund-manager profits, suggesting a 33% effective rate on income now taxed at 15%.
The fund-manager tax is part of a broad package to extend jobless benefits and expired tax breaks the Senate is starting debate on Tuesday.
The Senate’s proposal comes after the House in May approved a 35% effective tax on fund managers’ carried interest.
But unlike the House proposal, Senate Democrats are proposing a lower, 31% rate for carried interest profits from investments held seven years or longer. That was done to placate Democratic senators worried about the effect of the tax increase on venture capitalists and real-estate partnerships.
There’s an idiom about difficult activities being like “cutting ice.” This is like going at it with a butter knife on the iceberg that sunk the Titanic.
…at the America’s Future Now conference, Rep. Barbara Lee is telling the assembled to call their Senators and push them to pass the jobs bill. If I read their changes right, the Senate bill will have more stimulus in it.
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Doing a quick bit of math with some reasonable assumptions, the $200 billion works out to employment for roughly two million people for one year. We’re already at least ten million jobs behind where we were two years ago – probably twice that.
That in itself might not be sufficient criticism, but when you add to it all the things that we need to do in America – improve roads and mass transit, create more medical facilities and train and/or employ more medical professionals, expand non-military science and engineering funding (for alternative energy and space exploration, for instance), etc., it’s clear that there’s a whole lot we should be doing while putting people to work. That’s the problem with this bill, it doesn’t do anywhere near enough, and it could logically be made to do much, much more that would help our economy.
Well, it’s just too bad that all those lazy unemployed people won’t be able to afford health insurance (or food or shelter). /s
I wish that legislators would have to spend at least two months at the same income as unemployment, without other income at all, so they get some idea of what it’s like. Including looking for work and not even getting ‘we’re sorry but you don’t fit our needs’ messages.
Some help for the needy, complements of our legislators:
A Modest Proposal
Oil patch morals are going around
How ’bout oil rustling. yep, I ‘m serious
http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/53738
The Cobra subsidy blows the cover off the real farce the so called Health Reform was. Millions will still go without any coverage tomorrow and Obamacare does nothing for these people for yrs. in the future if ever. We can expect no help from this Congress either way, so much for HOPE and CHANGE. We need a real 3rd party not another right wing party like Perot’s reform party was. Working people need their own party that really represents them. I don’t mention the middle class because it’s rapidly vanishing.
Gov Schwartzenegger has endorsed some CA govt depts setting up food and clothing banks for govt employees who cannot get by on their wages. Due to the furloughs this year, CA govt employees (the ones fortunate enough to have a job) have experienced something like a 15% decrease in their salaries. They do have benefits, but most of them have to pay some fees associated with health care.
Imagine: food and clothing banks for govt employees? And this passes by with nary a comment in our easily distracted citizenry.
Of course, of E-Meg Whitman happens to win as Gov in Nov, she’ll go after the remaining CA govt employees with a hatchet whilst her uber wealthy buddies stand around clapping and cheering.
Quite honestly, I don’t know where these rich people think the money will flow from once they downtrodden as many US citizens as possible. After all, who will be around for them to fleece? Because that’s what’s happening now: robbery. When citizens are tapped out… what next?
Speaking of incompetence, who let the estate tax lapse for 2010, costing the Treasury upwards of $25 billion?
Let me guess: the same people who berated unions for “wasting” $10 million on a primary fight.
IMHO it might be helpful to think of the transformation of a corrupt and ossified political and economic system as tantamount to the elimination of apartheid. Both had/have entrenched elites that had the power of the state at their disposal to suppress and quell any and all opposition. For the most part the elites in S.A. had a corrupt and complicit media willing to act as a filter of the “truth” and a conduit of propaganda. Are not the elites in the U.S. so blessed? Both systems had/have a small elite that benefits at the expense of the majority. The destruction of apartheid took years of organization, mobilization, protest and sacrifice. The loss of life on both sides was inevitable given the fact that power is never surrendered willingly. The U.S. public should be prepared.