Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [12]
Jeffcoat was embarrassed when she opened her large purse and her clothes and makeup kit fell out. “That’s the way it is when you stay with relatives,” she said. “You got to be ready to move.”
“I go to church,” she said. “Things will get better.” The president too believes in providence.
JOHN DODDS HAS worked for the Philadelphia Unemployment Project for twenty-five years. PUP is a nonprofit mix of an advocacy group and an employment-placement office. Computers provide connections to job postings. Phones are available for job applicants. A counselor advises groups and individuals looking for work. On this January morning, in the low-tech end of the placement center, the chalkboard postings were for temporary data-entry jobs at the local Internal Revenue Service office. Dodds and his small staff also work with legislators in Harrisburg and Washington. He refuses to guess what the “real” unemployment rate is when the Department of Labor is reporting 8 percent in Philadelphia. “I don’t want to get into those calculations about the undercounted unemployed. If you add in the discouraged workers who have stopped looking, the underemployed, the uncounted, it might be higher. But eight percent is high.”
Dodds is a realist. He notes that the federal tab for unemployment when state benefits run out is a big-ticket item. “It was $7.5 billion,” he said. “And who wants to raise taxes for the unemployed?” It is also unpopular with employers, since high unemployment rates tend to drive down wages by forcing workers to compete for jobs. So emergency federal unemployment benefits are a hard sell. Few members of Congress see any political payback for voting to extend unemployment benefits.
Although the $7.5 billion in federal benefits go to no one who will make a political contribution to the 2004 election—helping win what Karl Rove calls the “money primary”—it is still real economic stimulus. “That money goes right into the economy,” Dodds said. “And it goes to areas of high unemployment. Julia Jeffcoat will take every penny she gets in unemployment and spend it by the end of the week she got it. And she will the next week and the next week until she gets a job. Then whatever income she gets, she’ll spend all that. She is a raging machine for the economy. She’s popping everything she has right back into it.”
When you have no discretionary income, you spend everything you have.
Unemployment insurance was a New Deal program, created in 1935. Even then everyone understood that it served two purposes. Soft-hearted liberals celebrate the first: it provides income support for jobless workers and their families. Clear-eyed businesspeople celebrate the second: it props up the economy by keeping consumer spending alive during economic slowdowns. Those dollars flow right through the hands of the unemployed working class and into the bank accounts of the owning class. The dirty secret of the New Deal is what a giveaway it was to businesses big and small.
Here’s where you’ve got to recognize the genius of the Bushies. While the country is dragging through a recession, they come up with a way to put money directly into the pockets of big bidness, bypassing both workers and small businesses. (We told you in Shrub the guy is not dumb; Dubya Bush himself warns us about “misunderestimating” him.) Buoyed by the midterm elections, Bush surprised even his most ardent supporters with a $337 billion dividend tax giveaway to people who have enough stock to live off dividends. And he did it while he was stiffing the unemployed.
IF YOU WANT A REAL déjà voodoo economic experience, read The New York Times. High unemployment. Growing deficits. War with Iraq sinking the economy. House members complaining that unemployment causes real pain “in my neighborhood,” and filing a bill that “will provide relief for unemployed Americans whose benefits have been exhausted.