Unemployment

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The following is from "The New York Times":

January 30, 2004
Exhausting Federal Compassion

The pernicious joblessness bedeviling the nation is spawning a new category of Americans dubbed "exhaustees": the hundreds of thousands of hard-core unemployed who have run through state and federal unemployment aid. According to the latest estimates, close to two million Americans, futilely hunting for work while scrambling for economic sustenance, will join the ranks of exhaustees in the next six months. They represent a record flood of unemployed individuals with expired benefits — the highest in 30 years — who are plainly desperate for help.

President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress are doing nothing to help these people. Washington showed no qualms last month in allowing the expiration of the emergency federal program that had offered an extra 13 weeks of help to those who exhausted state benefits. Historically, such help has been continued in periods of continuing job shortages.

A year ago, the aid was extended an extra year by Republican leaders. But now, the G.O.P.''s election-year talk is of a recovery rooted in the tax cuts weighted for affluent America. Tending to the exhaustees clearly mars that message.

The emergency program cries out for immediate renewal. It costs $1 billion a month, money that is available from the federal unemployment fund.

In January alone, 375,000 unemployed people are running out of state benefits with nothing to help them through to spring, according to estimates of new federal data by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a capital watchdog group. Without action, the exhaustee toll will mount.

Many will slip into the limbo of the more than 1.5 million Americans who have given up looking for work in the inert employment market. These amount to the flatliners, industrious people overlooked on the administration''s screen of spiking recovery indexes.

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Bob Herbert writes in his Op Ed column in "The New York Times" that the Republicans' time may be up. Due to unemployment. I am sick and tired of the world "Liberal" being a dirty word. I am sick and tired of Democrtas who turn their backs on FDR and try to pander to the right. I hope Bob Herbert is right!!!

Here is his column from "The New York Times":

February 6, 2004
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Tuning Out the G.O.P.'s Siren Song
By BOB HERBERT

Maybe it's too much to hope for. But I wonder if we aren't watching the beginning of a decline in the effectiveness of the Republican Party's divide-and-conquer strategy.

For nearly half a century the G.O.P. has displayed an unparalleled mastery of the ugly art of devising campaigns that appeal to the very worst in us. It's always the whites against the blacks, the middle class against the poor, the conservatives against the hated liberals, with the word "liberal" spat out with the kind of disgust that's usually reserved for child molesters.

The party's at it again this year with talk of defacing the Constitution with its first discriminatory amendment, a ban on gay marriage.

But there are other currents moving through this election season that may tend to pull some diverse segments of the population closer together politically. For example, there are few things worse for a president seeking re-election than large numbers of jobless voters. Even in a state as solidly pro-Bush as South Carolina, the No. 1 issue on the minds of voters is a staggering loss of jobs.

Neal Thigpen, a political science professor at Francis Marion University in Florence, S.C., said he believes that President Bush will carry the state easily in the fall. But he told me: "I don't think Bush will do as well as he did four years ago. I think his stock is down a little. I'm not gonna kid you."

The Bush tax cuts and the turnaround in the economy have been a boon to folks at the high end of the economic ladder. The Wall Street Journal ran an article on Wednesday about the resurgence of lavish spending by the investment crowd. It featured accounts of giddy highfliers getting married at the palace of Versailles, stepping up their purchases of Porsches, Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces, and exhibiting "a renewed appetite for chartered jets."

At the same time, the underclass and the middle class are increasingly facing similar predicaments: job losses, hard times and an extremely uncertain future.

The blows are coming from myriad directions. On Tuesday The Times's Milt Freudenheim wrote: "Employers have unleashed a new wave of cutbacks in company-paid health benefits for retirees, with a growing number of companies saying that retirees can retain coverage only if they are willing to bear the full cost themselves."

Anxiety about jobs and the economy may be knitting together voters who in past years felt they had little in common.

Another broad issue that increasing numbers of voters are coalescing around is President Bush's credibility problems. There were no weapons of mass destruction. So why have we sacrificed the lives of more than 500 American troops and thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians? What was the noble cause for which they died?

On the home front, Mr. Bush has come up with a budget that is so irresponsible and deceitful it has rattled public officials and ordinary voters on the right and the left. (The Times, in an editorial headline, called it "The Pinocchio Budget.") As presented, the budget would jack up military spending by 7 percent, to $26.5 billion. But that figure does not include the money needed to cover the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. We'll get those numbers later. After the election.

What the budget does include are additional tax breaks for the wealthy, along with proposals that would deal potentially crippling blows to government support for education, environmental protection, veterans programs, low-income housing, child care and the like.

What seems to be unsettling to large numbers of voters (not just hard-core anti-Bush Democrats) is the notion that events are slipping — or have slipped — out of control, that there is no endgame in Iraq, no plan to rein in runaway deficits, no strategy to put Americans back to work, and no limit to the Bush administration's willingness to shower its friends with favors and public dollars.

The Democratic primaries and caucuses have drawn record turnouts and sparked genuine excitement. Republicans are expressing concern that the administration has been thrown on the defensive. Already there is an attempt by the G.O.P. to divert attention from the real issues by chanting incessantly about gay marriages and the fact that John Kerry is — uh-oh — a liberal from Massachusetts.

That would be a travesty, and I hope the voters don't allow it.

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