Reply #32: I've been unemployed (without unemployment, like $0 in regular income) for nearly a year now... [View All]

[LooseWilly]

I think this capitulation was an embarrassment. I am not pleased.

Luckily I socked money way, just in case. Luckily my mom died and left a 401K (so much for retirement for her... worked her to death, but now it's paying for the upward spiraling costs of my son going to school).

Luckily I found myself living on the streets and shoplifting for food for a while many years back— now I'm not afraid of it. Living off park benches, huddling on sidewalks with overhangs when it rains, sink bathing in a train station bathroom, or a McDonald's bathroom... stocking up on Burger King napkins to use to wipe my ass when I had to shit in the park because there were no open fast food bathrooms in the middle of the night... it's really not that bad.

It can be downright fun if your neighbor on the next park bench over is ok. And if the government has money enough to hire people to clean the parks.

In exchange for 13 months of unemployment coverage for the relatively newly unemployed, Obama has voluntarily blown $900 billion (using numbers from Countdown) for two years of extensions of top marginal tax rate cuts and capital gains tax rates cuts... A hole in the budget that will almost certainly require cuts in social services (right about the time that those who receive the extended unemployment are likely to lose it and need social services the most)...

The capitulation is short sighted and cowardly. It's too bad Obama has never been homeless, or maybe he'd know that, with some social services to lean on, it can be weathered... but once those social services are cut to finance this short term spurt of kindliness toward the unemployed— the homeless to come will be twice-over-screwed.

My advice for the twice-over-screwed... arrange your shoplifting around the library hours so that you don't lose out on valuable internet access time. Consider broadening your underground economic skills with apprenticeship programs with your local drug dealers... you're all out there on the same streets after all. As long as the corporate money keeps outsourcing overseas, lessons hard learned in the neighborhoods long used to high unemployment are lessons that the rest of the city will increasingly want to learn. Get in on the ground floor... with the Democrats always looking out for new opportunities to snatch defeat from the jaws of success, I suspect it's going to be the only game left in town. Well, that and working retail at the mall frequented by the rich who're scheduled to get huge tax break extensions...