Who knew? Unemployment for Millionaires
At last, something both Republicans and Democrats can agree on!
Hey, who says there’s no bipartisanship anymore!?
Late last night, Senate Republicans and Democrats came together, joined hands, sang campfire songs, and voted as one to end unemployment benefits for individuals who had been fired AND had an income of over $1 million in the previous year. It was part of the one big, beautiful bill, or whatever marketing nonsense the administration is calling it.
For years, I’ve listened to all this talk about how poor people are gaming the system, and how the unemployment system needs to be changed and tweaked to keep folks who have lost their jobs from getting benefits they don’t really deserve. I watched in Kansas as the legislature created barrier after barrier to make it harder for working people to get help if they got laid off or fired.
Good thing we’re doing all we can to save these sort of benefits for people who really need and deserve them.
You are living in a ruse.
Rich people rule the world. They game the system for themselves and screw you to make sure you never have enough extra time or money to put up much of a fight. Just this morning I was thinking about how I’ve had some sort of side hustle all my life. Most people I know do, too, or a second job - because we’ve been squeezed so hard that we have no breathing room with one job. In two generations, we’ve moved from decent viability for one-income families, to needing two incomes to make it, to needing two incomes and something on the side to get by. I don’t know how much more evidence we need before people stop buying the rhetoric and lies of self-serving policymakers, corporate executives, and trust-fund babies.
This bill represents the biggest upwards redistribution of wealth most of us will ever see. It is a very clear effort to step on the throats of working people, take away resources that give them any semblance of freedom from corporate enslavement, all to finance the fever dream desires of the elite.
This legislation that is almost certain to pass Congress raises the debt ceiling by $5 trillion dollars, and increases our budget deficit by $3 trillion dollars. Most of the cost is to pay for tax cuts that you’ll never enjoy because you don’t make enough money. To pay for that, we’ll kick your mom out of her nursing home, make life harder for hungry children, and fail to follow through on our promises to veterans.
Yet, where are the cries from the budget hawks? Where are the protestations from leaders who claim to represent the working class? Where are those who have long said we can’t invest in the wellbeing of Americans, lest it increase our debt and ruin our nation’s finances?
They are silent, because they serve their party, their corporate backers, their wealthy friends, and themselves.
I appreciate what Sen. Angus King had to say during debate on the bill yesterday, and think it sums up pretty well what’s happening right now in Washington, D.C.
“This bill is a farce,” said Senator Angus King (I-ME). “Imagine a bunch of guys sitting around a table, saying, ‘I've got a great idea. Let's give $32,000 worth of tax breaks to a millionaire and we’ll pay for it by taking health insurance away from lower-income and middle-income people. And to top it off, how about we cut food stamps, we cut SNAP, we cut food aid to people?’... I've been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate. I have never seen a bill this bad. I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.”
“When I worked here in the 70's,” King said, “I had insurance as a…junior staff member in this body 50 years ago. Because I had that insurance that covered a free checkup, I went in and had my first physical in eight years…and the doctors found a little mole on my back. And they took it out. And I didn't think much of it. And I went in a week later and the doctor said, ‘You better sit down, Angus. That was malignant melanoma. You're going to have to have serious surgery.’… And I had the surgery and here I am. If I hadn’t had insurance, I wouldn’t be here. And it’s always haunted me that some young man in America that same year had malignant melanoma, he didn’t have insurance, he didn’t get that checkup, and he died. That’s wrong. It’s immoral.”
Senator King continued: “I don’t understand the obsession and I never have…with taking health insurance away from people. I don’t get it. Trying to take away the Affordable Care Act in 2017 or 2018 and now this. What’s driving this? What’s the cruelty to do this, to take health insurance away from people knowing that it’s going to cost them…up to and including…their lives.”