The GOP has all the Evangelicals out praying their butts off that the ACA fails or at least looks bad long enough for them to make it the primary item in the 2014 election but that’s not really what’s important at this point. The ACA is what it is. It is having trouble as all big programs have trouble getting off the ground but with some fixes, including a couple of big ones like pushing through single payer, it will eventually be fine.
The big item for 2014 will be jobs and wages, mainly because between the two of them they affect more people and have a bigger impact on those that are affected by them. The extension of unemployment insurance is a big concern right now, but the long-term problems are the availability of jobs, the ability of those out of work to fill the jobs available, the ability of out of work people to get to where the jobs are and the wages that those jobs and others will pay.
Everyone and his brother is cashing in on these problems and some of the points of view defy credulity. The idiot, congressman Matt Salmon, ® Arizona was on the tube recently, airing his views on the unemployment situation and the lack of jobs. Why is it that people who are stupid always have to prove it to you? Anyway, Salmon wants Harry Reid to take up some of the 39 bills that the Right has sent up to the Senate but he’s too dumb to realize that Reed won’t consider them because they are all or at the very least mostly useless junk that won’t help the poor or the unemployed find jobs nor will they help create any real jobs. You don’t create jobs by lowering taxes. You don’t create jobs by giving rich people tax breaks. Money doesn’t trickle down from the rich to the poor. The rich keep all the money they get. You create jobs by priming the pump, by fixing or creating infrastructure, by educating a class of people who have lost their jobs, so that they can compete in the new fields that have replaced the fields in which they formerly held jobs, jobs that are no longer necessary.
All this moron knows to do, is attack regulation, What he is too ignorant to understand is that the lack of regulation is what allowed Wall Street, the Banking community and the Real Estate industry to destroy our economy in the first place. But this idiot wants to cut more regulation and allow it to happen again. How will that help create jobs? The top 1%, the private sector, have plenty of money. They are not spending it to create jobs because they don’t have consumers. They will never create consumers until more people are back at work. This will only happen when the government creates jobs, primes the pump, trough the creation of infrastructure, research projects and extended education of those who can no longer do any of the jobs that are coming onto the market.
This moron’s idea of how to get people back to work is to approve the Keystone pipeline, which will create a couple of hundred full time jobs, a couple, less that two thousand, part time construction jobs, while it is poisoning the water table for the entire mid-west, encouraging the complete ecological destruction of a whole area of Canada and poisoning the atmosphere of wherever it is burned. How brain-dead can you get? But that’s his answer to job creation. That’s the answer of all his ilk to job creation, which is why they have no real answers. This clown wants the answer to come from the private sector that is so busy holding onto its money that it will never create jobs until the government creates a viablke consumer base.
Even when it is pointed out to him that a good part of the expense of extending unemployment will float back into the economy because those with little money, don’t save any of it; they spend it all right away, for everyday needs, he fails to understand. It’s like talking to a wall, which is about the same intelligence level as Salmon.
Next to this guy Peter King looks almost bright. He does understand that we have to extend unemployment. He realizes that there are people looking for help that need it until they find jobs. He’s right about needing more jobs and not wanting a permanent underclass.
When asked about any chance of raising the minimum wage Salmon replies, as expected, that the minimum wage rise will hurt the poor. Is he real or is he a Koch Brothers wet dream? When asked the obvious question, “Why does it hurt someone to pay them more money?” Salmon stumbles around, babbles about 18-28 years olds making minimum wage, makes absolutely no sense and wanders off into a rant about needing a president who will reach across the aisle. Of course we would all like that but the President, in order to be able to reach across the aisle, needs someone to be there, to accept his hand. I suppose Salmon thinks that guy is Mitch McConnell whose first statement after Obama got elected was that his only mission would be to keep Obama from getting reelected. Good old Mitch was as successful with that as he has been in helping the people who elected him.
What the hell is so hard to understand? The economy rises or falls on its consumer base. In order to create a consumer base you have to have people working at good wages. In order to achieve that you must create jobs that pay well. If the private sector refuses to do that, as they have been doing for the last sixty years, then the government must create those jobs as they did in the thirties with the WPA, the Civilian Conservation Corps and eventually the war effort.
Our country is in dire need of replaced infrastructure. That would create hundreds of thousands of jobs for people who can no any longer compete in the emerging job market. This is not rocket science. This is basic logic. Why are so many supposedly smart people unable to see this? There can be only one answer. That they are doing so well, under the current situation, that they don’t want it to change.
This year the market went wild and did far better than anyone could hope, but the market is no indicator of how well the average person is doing. The market tells us what great financial strides the rich are making. Poor people can barely afford to pay the rent and feed the kids. They don’t play the markets, which are essentially legal gambling. So the fate of the market has no effect on anyone but the 1% of rich people and a few people slightly lower on the economic ladder that already have lots of money. I heard someone say this weekend that millions are affected by the markets because of their 401K and other retirement funds. That’s true, but those people aren’t immediately aware of that because it doesn’t put money in their hands now. The growth of the market really doesn’t create more jobs; it only gives the already rich, a little more money, or a lot more money. Its success only immediately affects the rich or the almost rich. The poor can’t afford to play the market and the middle class really doesn’t exist any more.
The income for the 1% is up 30% this year, the average income for all the rest of the country, up 1%. That’s disgraceful
Denying Americans the help that will allow them to continue living their lives while withholding from them the potential to improve those lives is completely counter productive for the entire nation, including the 1%. To refuse struggling Americans this help is stupid, greedy and incompetent. If that’s what the GOP wants, so be it, but they will pay at the polls in 2014.
The GOP says okay to extending the unemployment benefits but only if we can do it in a fiscally responsible way. In English that means how do we pay for it. But 14 of the last 17 times we’ve extended those benefits there were no “buts” attached to it. Congress must extend the benefits. If they don’t, not just the 1.3 million effected now will be hurt but almost 9 million more,
I listened to a GOP spokesman say that it isn’t that they are against extending the benefits, it’s just that they don’t see any end to it and they believe that any legislation in that area must have answers to the unemployment situation, answers that help us to end it.
That makes perfect sense but unfortunately, like Obamacare and all the other programs that the GOP is against, they have perfectly sensible ideas about what should not be done but absolutely no idea of how anything can be accomplished. Yes, we should be doing something to help people who are out of work find jobs, that’s just as important as helping them to pay the rent until they do, but as soon as we do what the Republicans suggest, they protest and block that move because everything that can possibly be done costs money and the one thing the GOP can’t possibly agree to is spending money on anything but the military.
Everyone who has any intelligence knows what to do to help people find jobs, especially those people who come from the now, non-existent sphere of grunt labor jobs. You have to build infrastructure, you have to educate people in new technology, where many high paying jobs actually are going begging and you have to move families to areas where work exists. Each of these solutions costs money, money that will have to come from the government, money that will have to come from raised taxes and that’s exactly where the Right slams on the brakes.