The Republicans Approach To Jobless Benefits

by Political Ironing on July 26, 2010 |   Trackback URI   |     Email This Post Email This Post   |   13509 Views  

Republican Approach To Unemployment Benefits Comic

This past month, Senate Republicans filibustered against a bill to extend jobless benefits to over 2 million unemployed Americans, saying they were fiscally unwise and irresponsible given the current national deficit. It’s too bad all of these Republicans voted for Bush’s tax cuts:

Cost of Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy for fiscal year 2010: $200 billion [source 1, 2] (Note: This only covers one year of the cost of Bush’s tax cuts, which are estimated to cost the US Treasury over $2.2 trillion if extended to 2020).

Cost of jobless benefits for fiscal year 2010: $34 Billion [Source 1]

See Also: Longer Unemployment Equals Worse Re-employment, Chart Of The Day II, Bush-Era Tax Cuts a Likely Campaign Theme, Calls to extend Bush tax cuts face difficult pay-as-you-go reality, Bold action to solve problems, If Senate Republicans Really Care About Unemployed, Why Delay Benefits for 30 Hours After Passage is Assured?, The Economy: “White House Predicts Record $1.47 Trillion Deficit”, and White House Expects Unemployment Above 9% Until 2012.

Technorati Tags: jobless benefits, unemployment benefits, republican, extension of jobless benefits, bush tax cuts, cost of jobless benefits, july 2010, republicans, comic, national debt, national deficit, cartoon, facts, figures, statistics

Share And Save
Other Posts On ProseBeforeHos You Might Like

On Slashing $100 Million
Remember The Legacy Of George Bush
Unemployment Rates By State In The U.S.
The GOP’s Big Deficit Lie

  • Pingback: === popurls.com === popular today

  • Anonymous

    How nice and easy it is to point the finger and say that these people, the rich, don’t need or desreve to keep thier own money to invest in jobs or to spend that helps to create and sustain jobs. I can not understan how or why you think you have more of a right to thier earned income than they do. I think unempolyment should be extended, I also think that is not responsible to keep spending money with saying how you will pay for it. If the Democrats and Republicans would quit spending our money to stay in office and start acting like responsible citzens and freeze ALL spending at today levels, no increased spending for any program and then cut programs or let programs expire that are no longer useful we could balance the budget and pay our debt in no time. I would like to see a consituional admendment that would prohibit congress from rasing taxes and spending more money that we have coming in with out a special election.

    • Anonymous

      ah, but if it were only that simple.

    • harrison

      I don’t think anyone will disagree as to people not deserving their own money, but one must admit that the wealthiest do not pay their fair share.

      http://www.thenation.com/article/37889/no-oligarchy

      • Anonymous

        They actually do pay their fair share and are under the exact same tax laws as everyone else. The wealthy pay the VAST majority of taxes paid in this country.

        • Anonymous

          And the wealthy also hold 90% of the country’s money. There needs to be a balance somewhere.

        • Anonymous

          The wealthy also possess the vast majority of the wealth. So it is only fair that they pay the majority of the taxes.

          • 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
          • 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
          • 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
          • 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
          • A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
          • 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
          • Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
          • Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
          • In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
          • As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
          • The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
          • or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
          • This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
          • Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
          • Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

          The reality is that no matter how smart, how strong, how educated or how hard working American workers are, they just cannot compete with people who are desperate to put in 10 to 12 hour days at less than a dollar an hour on the other side of the world.

      • David

        95% of the total federal income tax confiscated from the 50% of citizens who make enough to pay taxes is from those supposed “evil” rich people. So guess what? When there’s a tax cut, they’re the first to benefit since they pay the most! You’ve fallen into the class warfare trap that distracts you from real problems, such as government telling the unemployed not to look for work as long as tax-payers keep sending those checks!

    • BoPeaslee

      Would we care about balancing the budget as much if there wasn’t an annual deficit? Does it make sense to lower taxes at all when you consider the cost of 11 years of war and maintaining a military that costs 5-6 times that of China’s and Russia’s combined. It seems to me that people say that they want a balanced budget, but are loathe to give anything up … except the well being of the less fortunate. Think about this … our deficit would still be huge, even if we ignored the poor, the old, and the unfortunate. But of course, we don’t want to ignore your poor, the old, and the unfortunate.

    • Anonymous

      I don’t know if you watch the news, but Reaganomics doesn’t work.

    • Anonymous

      “How nice and easy it is to point the finger and say that these people, the rich, don’t need or desreve to keep thier own money to invest in jobs or to spend that helps to create and sustain jobs”
      Belief in ‘trickle-down’ economics is largely why financial burden is as great as it is today. Moreover, this isn’t about “keeping their own money” – it’s about removing the vehicles that allow them to not pay their fair share in taxes. Why should someone pay less in taxes just because they’re very rich? Yes, ideally that money would be spent invested in our nation to create and sustain jobs, but in practice we’ve seen that the gap between the rich and everyone else is only getting wider – meaning it’s being pocketed, not reinvested.

      • Zach

        Hey, trickle econ. down creates plenty of jobs! It’s just the fact that they are in the Maldives or Cabo for cabana boys is the problem…

    • Martin

      I know this is a hard concept to understand, but the wealthy have more money than they actually need, while the poor count on all their money to live. If you spend 2 dollars a day, but your income is 10, it’s different than spending 2 dollars on a .50 cent income.

      Cutting taxes for the rich means that they are getting richer, while contributing less to the country that allows them to get rich in the first place. Increasing taxes for the poor means that you’re giving them a harder time to come up with money to lead a normal life, with enough money for education, food, shelter, clothes and entertainment.

      Conservatives like to think that people that are poor don’t try hard enough, or are lazy or undriven. Poor people can remain poor simply by not being allowed to invest in more education, in a small business, college for their kids, etc.

      • Anonymous

        thank you for your sanity.

    • anonymous #2

      In fact, as Warren Buffet has pointed out, because of current tax law, the wealthiest people in America actually pay less in proportion to their earned income than people like school teachers, firefighters so on and so forth. (He said he pays less % in taxes than his secretary) You must be really rich to be talking like that, either that, or you are just being spoon fed talking points by the super rich who are stealing your hard earned money. It is astonishing to me how middle class people can stick up for the wealthiest when we have had more white collar crime in the past decade than ever before, and we have seen actual income for the middle class flatline.

      The only evidence that I need to point out to you is that this voodoo economic scheme that Bush I pointed out in 1980, is in fact that. Voodoo economics. Cutting taxes for the rich does not create jobs. THey just did that and what happened? There was real job growth. We deregulated and cut taxes and the rich people just kept the money and shipped jobs over seas to make even more money! Do you honestly think that a rich person is going to take the money he/she saved in income tax- which is what we’re talking about, not tax on business, and create a job? Hell no. They’re going to buy another forclosed house, fix it up and flip it at a huge profit. They’ll just keep depressing your wages even further. In 1980, the average executive made 50x’s the average worker. Now it is 250x’s. How is that fair? The tax rate used to be 90% for the top earners. Now it is something like 36%, and Obama wants to raise it back to pre 2001 levels (39.5%) and we have people up in arms over it. Wake up! We can’t be in two wars and have an economic crisis and keep taxes low on people who are living very comfortable. Its insanity.

      Tell me why Exxon didn’t pay any federal tax this year?

    • If you’re rich you work harder!?

      I cannot stand the idea that rich people got rich because they work the hardest.

      Hard work does not equal high pay. Reality.

      They might work smarter, maybe cook their books and scheme a bunch of people out of their 401k’s… but certainly they do not work harder.

      Go job shadow a construction worker or a door to door salesman, or a school teacher. Or hell, a stay at home mom. There aren’t many of those anymore because the middle class needs two incomes to survive while the richest people are getting their meals made for them and travelling on private jets after their companies tank. The middle class is being ripped off, and what is worse, they are actually thank you sir may I have some more. How is it that top 5% can control the other 95% in such a way as to even make them think they don’t deserve to have basic rights like healthcare and schooling. Its sickening.

      • Anonymous

        The rich work real hard.. two words come to mind

        Paris Hilton

  • memphius

    DEMOCRACY IS A FIGMENT OF OUR IMAGINATION.

  • http://chaz4224@yahoo.com chuck

    trickle down or voodoo economics doesn’t work it does not create jobs no matter how many ways they repackage this crap they’ve been in place for years now no jobs when you give companies tax breaks to go overseas you destroy your taxbase oh and the rich don’t need those tax breaks to keep the money that was earned by their workers wirh the declining wages and standard of living oh lets quit spending half our money on defense

  • matt

    tax cuts stimulate the economy,
    un-employment benifits dont

    • Anonymous

      Oh yeah. Its supposed to trickle down.

    • Anonymous

      Really?

      If you want to stimulate the economy you have to get people spending money.

      How is giving money to a person who has more then they could spend in a life time is going to stimulate the economy?

      They can already buy what ever they want. Why do they need a tax break (more money) before they decided to go shopping?

      A person who is on unemployment is going to go out and buy groceries, clothes, pay his bills, in other words he is going to spend the money as he gets it.

      By the way, unemployment insurance is just that insurance. Workers pay into the fund each week out of their salary.. it is NOT a handout, any more than filing a claim with your car or health insurance.

  • Anonymous Responder

    When you say the unemployed don’t have any rights to the wealthy’s “earned” income I shuttered. Earned? Typically when we’re talking about the tax cuts for the rich their isn’t much “earning” going on. They aren’t earning 300,000 a year working a 40 hour a week job. They are living in up in the Hamptons and receiving dividend checks off of massive stock holdings. They contribute little to society beyond spending on luxury items. This money came about with the help of society. They benefited from the structure in place from government and roads and the working people. Giving back won’t hurt them. If they go without an extra yacht so 100′s of unemployed people can continue to eat I think that’s fair enough.

  • Pingback: Hypocrisy At It’s Worst: 40 Senate Republicans Who Filibustered $25 Billion In Benefits For The Unemployed Because It Was “Fiscally Irresponsible” All Voted For Bush Tax Cuts That Will Cost America Over $2 Trillion « Netcrema ̵

  • JC

    I does not cost the government anything not to take my money – it does cost me money to have the government take my money and give it to someone else

  • mrpro

    Only Libs think that letting U.S. citizens keep their hard earned money is a “cost” to the country. Libs, can’t do math, always name calling.

    • Anonymous

      Only neo-conservatives believe that giving the most wealthy in the country big tax breaks (which have not been re-invested into the economy YET) is far better for the economy than giving someone that is unemployed money to LIVE (which goes DIRECTLY back into the economy).

      Who exactly fails at simple math?

  • Garry

    If we’d stop pouring money into the twin sinkholes of Iraq and Afghanistan and funding the massively-useless- except-to-stockholders military-industrial-complex, we’d suddenly have more than enough money for real concerns like health care, job creation, education and green energy. Or how about all of the condition-free foreign aid we give way every year? Doesn’t charity begin at home? Just sayin’………

  • Eric B

    The rich are the ones who hire everyone else. With out there money there will never be investment and growth. What we need is a flat tax and everyone pays the same rate. But no lets point fingers and the rich!! When in reality—–

    “About 47 percent will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009. Either their incomes were too low, or they qualified for enough credits, deductions and exemptions to eliminate their liability. That’s according to projections by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research organization.

    Most people still are required to file returns by the April 15 deadline. The penalty for skipping it is limited to the amount of taxes owed, but it’s still almost always better to file: That’s the only way to get a refund of all the income taxes withheld by employers.

    In recent years, credits for low- and middle-income families have grown so much that a family of four making as much as $50,000 will owe no federal income tax for 2009, as long as there are two children younger than 17, according to a separate analysis by the consulting firm Deloitte Tax.

    Tax cuts enacted in the past decade have been generous to wealthy taxpayers, too, making them a target for President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress. Less noticed were tax cuts for low- and middle-income families, which were expanded when Obama signed the massive economic recovery package last year.

    The result is a tax system that exempts almost half the country from paying for programs that benefit everyone, including national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education. It is a system in which the top 10 percent of earners — households making an average of $366,400 in 2006 — paid about 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.

    The bottom 40 percent, on average, make a profit from the federal income tax, meaning they get more money in tax credits than they would otherwise owe in taxes. For those people, the government sends them a payment.”

    • A

      Any Evidence?

      • David

        Evidence? Wow, you must be more ignorant than most.
        There’s these things called books. Hint: Not the ones written by your state run “education” system.

        • The Real David

          The state does not write the text books.
          Please point out the jobs created during the 8 years Bush was cutting taxes and spending money on war, that was not in the budget.
          What does a CEO do to warrant a 50 million dollar salary? I truly want to know what talent they offer?
          I see value in a teacher. I see no societal growth from a hedge fund.

    • Anonymous

      I am one of those families making less than %50K a year with 2 children under 17.

      While I may pay a small amount in income tax, income tax is not the only tax I pay. I pay:

      * Property tax
      * Sales tax
      * Gas tax
      * Cigarette tax
      * Alcohol tax
      * Car registration fee
      * Small business tax
      * Payroll tax
      * just to name a few

      All of these taxes are paid at the same rate as a person making $50 million a year. So in actuality I do pay a higher % of my income in total taxes than the rich guy.

      One other thing, if you don’t want to pay income taxes, take a pay cut… I am always willing to swap salaries with a rich guy but for some reason I never get any takers.. wonder why?

      • David

        I notice you said “swap salaries” and not “swap jobs”. Like most, you want more money (preferably from other taxpayers), but aren’t willing to work for it. Classic entitlement mentality.

        • Anonymous

          Nice strawman there cowboy.

    • Anonymous

      “The result is a tax system that exempts almost half the country from paying for programs that benefit everyone, including national defense, public safety, infrastructure and education.”

      Wow, you don’t know anything about the Federal Income tax, eh? Before the 16′th amendment, the government used excise taxes to pay for national defense, states/localities used property taxes to pay for public safety, gasoline tax and highway use tax (truckers) pays for infrastructure, and school district taxes paid for education.

      Guess what, NOTHING CHANGED. Your federal income tax dollars pay the US Government’s debt to the Federal Reserve (enacted by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913) for every CENT of US currency in circulation (both in the US, and abroad). Yes, your federal income tax money goes directly to a privately held banking institution that does the job that was given to Congress and the US Mint in the constitution.

  • Pingback: The Cost of the Tax Cuts for the Wealthy

  • Dear Anonymous

    The really wealthy people attempt to share their wealth. Taxes are based on your income because high income earners have an obligation to pay more in taxes. I am not concerned with income levels of $100,000 to $200,000 per year. The concern is for the “real wealthy people” whose income and assets exceed hundreds of millions of dollars. Wake up… nobody is looking to take a bigger slice of your insignificant fraction of nothing. Asking the US Government to freeze spending is analogues to you holding your breathe for a few hours. It is not going to happen. In the end it would create more problems than it solves.

  • Pingback: Republican Fiscal Responsibility [comic] « Pkrf1end’s Blog

  • Anony Mouse

    The wealthy haven’t created any jobs with their tax cuts so far, why give them more. Trickle down economics should be called Tinkle down economics.

    • http://prosebeforehos.com/alec/ alec

      I hope a rich person pees on me!!!!

  • SJB

    Sad reading the posts of all of these brainwashed Working Class people on here sticking up for the Ruling Class millionaires!

    • http://prosebeforehos.com/alec/ alec

      Round here, we call it Economic Stockholm Syndrome.

  • Anonymous

    more accurate if the gator was named ‘stimulus’

  • Anonymous

    Why is it the underpriveliged and poor always cop the heavy end of the stick when it comes time for political muscle flexing? Whichever western country you go to, the continuing saga of the drain on the countries economy by unemployed people is played out, without any substantiating figures shown by the beancounters as a means of comparison to the no doubt countless millions or even billions ‘given’ to wealthy people as tax breaks. Come on, everybody has to start somewhere in life when trying to gain their little bit of peace and freedom, with a roof over their heads and maybe a family. If you deprive a whole population of people by forcing them to live on ‘bread and water’ then what options do they have other than to turn to criminal activity. How much does it cost to house a criminal in the jail system for 1 year or more? Multiply this figure many fold and all of a sudden that few million in benefits to the unemployed becomes billions, not to mention the cost in victims of crime payments, life, etc… Targeted programs to get people trained and into work are logical choices when trying to cut the burden of social welfare on society, and in a so called humanitarian world, isn’t this a humane way to treat the less fortunate.

  • Pingback: Don’t let’s tax and spend. | the fancyplex

  • Sick of beggars breeding beggars

    It’s a free country, which means, free enterprise. If you earn the money, you get the money. When I hear wailing and whining about how the rich should be gouged, it sounds to me like, “Hey, we’re sitting here on our asses, dropping out of school, making a fast buck here and there by scamming others, and we’re out of beer. Isn’t there more tax money we can get for food stamps so we can sell them for cash and get some beer? Those smart, hard-working, book learnin’ folks should share!” I can’t count, on all my digits, the number of people I have met who got knocked-up, let their cars run into the ground, and quit their jobs because welfare paid more. Lazy, irresponsible, voluntarily uneducated, baby making machines squealing for their fair share, and they don’t have one reason under their belts to have anything given to them. When programs that allow hand-outs are developed, there is no respect for what you are handed, and you just want more. Nobody owes anybody anything. So you were born, and now you exist. Why would that be any one person’s problem except your parents’ until you are 18 years old? I don’t owe people money for doing nothing in return. It’s impossible to make a worse deal. Money is used to trade. I see nothing worth your demands being offered in return. I see my house getting burglarized by the recipients of my tax dollars while I’m at work, then later using more of it to support your ass in prison, as well as supporting the cops who arrested you and the public defendant who tried to let you get away with it. Get pissed at yourselves. If you tax the wealthy to death, you will deplete your source and then what? Besides, taxing big, job-creating, money generating corporations would just run them out of town, and then, there will be fewer jobs to collect taxes on and more people needing to use it. What is so difficult to understand about that? We should run the rich out of town, settle for 3rd rate doctors and business men, and watch the state of the union go to hell while you’re all yelling at no one to hand their money over to you. If you could use money responsibly, you would know how to make your own, and if you had any self respect, you would do it.

    • Anonymous

      I’m going to resist the urge to call you the biggest flaming idiot I’ve ever seen. Have you ever left your house? Do you seriously think that every American with a low-income is a stupid, lazy, selfish scam-artist?

      I am a high school student in a low-income family, stuck in a cycle and trying desperately to get out of it. My mom is disabled, and my dad is a veteran with severe issues that the government is just now acknowledging. We get double penalty around every corner – brake light goes out, can’t afford to fix it, have to get to the doctor. Get a ticket. Get fined more because we don’t have the money to pay it on time. Have to overdraft for my sister’s diapers, get charged overdraft fees.

      I’m not trying to blame anyone else for our problems – I understand why overdraft fees and traffic tickets exist, and I don’t think we have any innate “right” to money – but you need to realize that we aren’t spending money on beer runs and lube, or burglarizing your house. You’re using this post as a way to rant about your hatred for people you seem to think are the scum of the earth, and this isn’t even about that. We don’t want your handouts, we just want to know it’s a level playing field.

Previous post:

Next post: