Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [10]
—GEORGE W. BUSH, STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS, JANUARY 29, 2002
This should bring some comfort to those of our fellow citizens who need extra help during the time in which they try to find a job.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, AT THE SIGNING OF THE UNEMPLOYMENT BILL, JANUARY 8, 2003
I’m exhausted.
—JULIA JEFFCOAT, JANUARY 15, 2003
Julia Jeffcoat was telling the story of the last ten years of her life as a city bus wended its way north out of downtown Philadelphia. The bus was a luxury. Julia usually walks the six miles between her “home” and the Center City office of the Philadelphia Unemployment Project. But the temperature was stuck below 20 degrees F., the wind blowing in hard gusts from the south. The Delaware and the Schuylkill Rivers were frozen over, and a New York publishing house was springing for the $1.10 bus token.
“I walked this morning,” Jeffcoat said. “It’s good exercise.” The exercise has kept Jeffcoat trim and youthful, but this engaging African-American woman with the generous, easy-to-read face is incapable of even a small lie for pride. “I don’t have money for the bus,” she confessed quietly.
The forty-three-year-old single mother gets none of the comfort promised by her president when he finally signed the bill authorizing extended benefits for the chronically unemployed on January 8, 2003. Her unemployment is too chronic by six months. She’s one of more than a million American workers not covered by the bill Bush signed after having ignored the unemployed for a year. By that time Julia and a million people like her had already fallen through a crack the size of the Grand Canyon. Another 1.2 million people were about to run out of benefits before Bush got the message that he’d be in trouble politically if he didn’t do something about it.
Who knows what finally moved Bush off the dime? Could have been the midterm elections that put Republicans in control of both houses of Congress, even though 2.2 million workers had lost their jobs since the 2000 election. Perhaps he realized his $337 billion dividend tax break for big investors would be a hard sell while the families of two million unemployed Americans couldn’t even find a faith-based soup kitchen. A Senate staffer who was working on unemployment issues back when Dubya Bush was running for governor of Texas says the unemployed had to wait: “It was the elections. The president couldn’t say a word about how bad the economy was until after the election.”
Whatever the reason, as Christmas 2002 approached, he at last addressed the problem. His delivery was flat, but when Bush got around to noticing the unemployed in his December 14 weekly radio address, his words sounded like Samuel Gompers’. “These Americans rely on their unemployment benefits to pay for the mortgage or rent, food, and other critical bills. They need our assistance in these difficult times and we cannot let them down.” By George, he’d noticed at last.
Too late for Julia Jeffcoat and a million other Americans waiting for the economic security Bush promised them.
Julia had lost her job as a security guard in December 2002. She got the twenty-six weeks of unemployment benefits most states provide. That’s $500 a month, but we can assure you it did not put Bush’s tax cuts at risk because it comes from a state trust funded by taxes paid by employers. Then Julia got a thirteen-week extension. When Julia says she is “exhausted,” she is not whining about walking to town to look for work. She means her unemployment benefits are exhausted.
When that happens during periods of high unemployment, the federal government usually steps in with extended benefits provided through temporary emergency unemployment-compensation laws. In the recession of the mid-seventies, benefit extensions allowed workers to collect unemployment for sixty-four weeks. During the Poppy Bush recession of the early nineties—after two vetoes—the first President Bush grudgingly agreed to an extension of twenty-six weeks.
But this is 2003. Times are tough. Dubya