Obama’s Job Jig: Pin-Up to GOP Voodoo

[Donnachaidh]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/pierre-tristam/38331/obama-s-job-jig-pin-up-to-gop-voodoo

If America’s 14 million unemployed had their own state, The Economist tells us this week, they’d form the fifth-largest one in the union, right behind Florida and ahead of Illinois. If you include the underemployed and those who’ve dropped off the unemployment rolls altogether, that population would be bigger than that of Texas. You could call it the State of Flagler (hold the Perry sauce).

Ten years ago it took an unemployed person an average of 17 weeks to find work. It now takes 40 weeks, assuming that person keeps looking. Florida has discovered an innovative way to kick people off the unemployment rolls. It requires workers to submit to interrogations first, docks them whatever meager pay they may be earning that month, puts them on hold for about four weeks if they have a question and are dumb enough to call, then leaves them with unemployment checks smaller than some sub-Saharan wages, if they make it that far. Tens of thousands don’t, opting out along the way. Problem solved, and Rick Scott takes credit.

It’s now clear that the first stimulus bill did not work as it should have—not because the stimulus wasn’t needed, but because it was too small, too brief and too lopsidedly favoring tax cuts instead of actual stimulus. It stopped unemployment levels from heading toward the 1930s and brought down the rate a full point. But devoting a third of the stimulus to tax cuts was worse than useless: it added to the deficit instead of creating jobs, Giorgio Armani stores aside. And the frenzy of cost-cutting at every level of government in the last two years, state and local governments especially, has been plain mad: the stimulus was taken out back, shot and buried--then blamed for failing by its executioners as tea party hypocrites, a Social Security check in one hand and a Medicare card in the other, danced on its grave.

Yet here was Barack Obama again proposing more tax cuts Thursday evening, playing into the very dogma that’s netted us colossal debt and zero return. Unless, that is, you’re sharing in this nation’s sacrifice from that top 5 percent bracket, the only bracket to reap a windfall from three decades of upper-class welfare, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s hand-outs to the top.

More at the link --