The Grinches Who Stole Summer

It was a branding moment. With their
lock-step vote against extending unemployment benefits, the Republicans
are indelibly marked as not only heartless but also frivolous in their
much-professed concern over the soaring national debt. Thanks to the
defection of the two relatively enlightened Republican senators from
Maine and the quick replacement of the late Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd,
unemployment checks that had been stalled for millions of American
families since early June will soon resume. But for Republicans, it has
been a defining issue that will haunt the party.

There is plenty to criticize in the
Democrats' handling of this economic crisis, mostly cribbed from the GOP
playbook, but once again the Republicans seem determined to prove that
when it comes to social compassion, they are the worst. How can they
defend having supported Republican President George W. Bush giving $180
billion to AIG but draw the line when a Democratic president seeks to
spend one-fifth of that amount helping millions of victims of the crisis
that AIG was so instrumental in causing?

While holding unemployment checks hostage
to demands for compensating budget cuts, Republican leaders claimed to
support the extension of benefits. They rejected the argument of some on
the harder ideological right that the average payment of $309 per week
is the lucrative prize that keeps the unemployed from going back to
work. They also conceded the obvious, that money given to the unemployed
will stimulate the economy at a high multiplier effect because it is
money that will be spent rather than hoarded.

Clearly the unemployed are far more likely
to spend the money they receive than would the recipients of tax cuts
for the rich that the GOP leadership so blithely recommends. And as
House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., was able to crow, while the
Republicans demand a cut in spending to cover the costs of unemployment
insurance, they make no such demand for their tax-cut proposal: "Our
Republican colleagues say, `No, you have got to pay for that, but you
don't have to pay for a tax cut for the wealthiest people in America'
which is about 20 times as much as the unemployment insurance."

Their excuse for separating 2.5 million
families from the checks needed to keep food on the table and cover the
rent is that the GOP leadership wanted to send a message, in the words
of the third-ranking Republican, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, that
the "federal debt has grown to an alarming level, where it is
threatening the future of our children and grandchildren."

Odd as it sounds, the $34 billion cost of the program to cover the
unemployed who have exhausted their 26 weeks of payments is chump change
in an overall budget of $3.7 trillion. When stacked against the serious
drivers of the debt, including a $700 billion military budget and a
financial bailout that has cost trillions in taxpayer debt without a
murmur of opposition from the GOP leadership, stonewalling on this
particular issue is absurd. It would have shocked even Richard Nixon,
who as president advocated a guaranteed minimum income for all
Americans, and not just those who have been thrown out of work through
no fault of their own.

Few, even in the GOP leadership, would deny
that the 8 million who lost their jobs due to the banking debacle were
the innocent victims of reckless banking policies. "There is no debate
in the Senate about whether we should pass a bill-everyone agrees that
we should," stated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "What
we do not support-and we make no apologies for-is borrowing tens of
billions of dollars to pass this bill at a time when the national debt
is spinning completely out of control."

Why no apologies for drawing the line at
the expense of the victims but not when it came to bailing out the
victimizers? Clearly the unemployed are the victims of forces far beyond
their own control, beginning with a housing market wrecked by the Ponzi
scheme of securitized mortgage debt made legal through financial
deregulation that virtually all Republicans, and too many Democrats,
long supported. Why is it acceptable for our government through the
Federal Reserve to have bought up $1.2 trillion of those toxic debt
obligations in a handout to the bankers who devised and sold them but
balk at committing a tiny fraction of that spending to helping those
thrown out of work?

That is the nub of it, and once again folks
with a social conscience are left with a failed two-party system in
which the Democrats, with much responsibility for this banking mess,
must at worst be judged the lesser evil.