A group of
Prescott activists met at the office of Congressman Paul Gosar on Jan. 9. We
were there to plead for mercy for our fellow Americans. The GOP still delayed a
bill to resume long-term unemployment benefits. One point three million workers had been
without incomes for almost two weeks. In the dead of winter, during the coldest
winter ever. It is a manmade economic catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane
Katrina. And “someone else’s family going broke’ isn’t typically the kind of
catastrophe GOP leadership cared about; so we were worried.
They were
using the same old dodge: They weren’t going to vote for anything that wasn’t
funded. As Rand Paul ranted, they certainly “weren’t going to borrow money from
China to pay people not to work.” Something was going to have to be cut, if they
were to be expected to care the families of 1.3 million Americans.
The GOP say
that unemployment benefits make people lazy, cause people to stay unemployed.
At a time when there are three job seekers for every new job posted, that’s easily
debunked. People receiving unemployment had been employed, contributing to
their own unemployment insurance, paying into the system, sometimes for decades,
for times exactly like this. It typically takes 35 weeks for a person who loses
their job to find an equitable replacement. The extended benefits would have
lasted 36 weeks.
Who really
benefits from unemployment benefits? Well yes, the people who don’t starve to
death or live in the streets, they, of course, get benefit, but more
importantly, money in the hands of the poor and middle class goes right back into
the stores where people shop, and onto the factories and farms that produce the
goods and produce those people consume. With
1.3 millions poor and middle class people, every extra dollar they have adds up
through consumer spending.
The 26 billion
or so the benefits are said to cost are about the same amount as the GOP cost
the government w their recent shutdown. If they are OK w borrowing money to
spite the president, why won’t they borrow to save the lives of Americans?
No matter what purity the GOP want to claim, when
it comes to taxes and borrowing money, the government already borrows 40% of
all it spends because of GOP resistance to taxes, which means that we still owe
the money later anyway. Who are they helping with this anti-tax BS? The public,
at some point, will still have to pay for the debt through future taxes. So
there are 100s of billions of dollars worth of things the GOP is ready to
borrow money on—but not our citizens.
Americans are
supposed to care for each other. It is in fact the clear and stated purpose of
the American government according the very Constitution Congress is charged w
upholding: to provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare of
all Americans, to raise sufficient taxes to do so when possible, to borrow when
necessary.
Consciously
choosing to extend their fellow Americans very real misery for their claim of
abstract principles violates their oath to the Constitution. They haven’t even gotten
the Preamble right and flunk at Article One. If they can’t get that right, how
can we trust them w the future? What kind of future are they after when they
are so willing to starve the present?
Grover
Norquist’s dream of having a government so small it could be drowned in a
bathtub, means government that could not provide social services to the needy,
security to the public, or infrastructure for the economy. Gosar also backs a
popular Tea Party concept of ending public education entirely. With no
education, social services, health care for the poor, or even fire or police
protection for areas who could not afford privatized services, much of America will
resemble a 3rd world country. So yeah, we were begging for an
extension of our fellow Americans’ unemployment benefits, begging for our
country, begging Paul Gosar to have a heart.
I wonder what
he will say?
--Mikel
Weisser is a Democratic candidate for US House of
Representatives and writes from the Left Coast of AZ.
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