Sequester Cuts and Killing Unemployment Benefit Extensions: When GOP Values Make no Sense

by Nomad

This week the Republicans appeared to be sticking to its tried and true conservative principles by blocking a vote on extending unemployment benefits. 

Add to that the impact of sequester cuts to state jobs training programs and you have a campaign issue nightmare. The question is: can any party get elected by hurting its most vulnerable voters? 
Not once but twice?

Two days ago, Republican conservatives used the power of the filibuster to block a Democratic bill to restore unemployment benefits to over a million Americans, hit hard by the recession. According to an announcement of this decision, the lawmakers declared they were standing on conservative principle.

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) stated:

"People, if you pay 'em for years and years, they won't look for a job." 

Who is the "'em" and who are the "they"? What happened to "us" and "we"? 

Extending unemployment benefits, he added, creates no jobs. At a cost of $6.4 billion, the cost of the extension could not be justified, according to the Republicans. Shelby told an interviewer,

"That is a huge expenditure. What we need to do is spend that money on retraining these people that are unemployed -- help them for a few months and get them retrained and get them back in the job market. That's the problem."

As we shall see, there is a major problem with that idea. 

Other Republicans cited their conservative principles to support the filibuster. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said:

"I certainly ran because we're mortgaging our children's future. We're bankrupting this nation."

It's not hard to imagine the possible fallout from this decision come election time. With more than.1.3 million people Americans left without any kind of safety net nationwide, it could make a difference who controls the houses of Congress.

To the Fiscal Brink: Will the GOP and the 1% now destroy the US economy?

by Nomad

B

rinkmanship is defined by Wikipedia as ”the practice of pushing dangerous events to the verge of disaster in order to achieve the most advantageous outcome.” 

When it comes to the US economy- which has been hobbling along like a forsaken three-legged dog- both parties have been testing the wills of their opposition and how it will end is, at the moment, anybody’s guess. What started out as intransigence on the part of the Republicans soon became open obstruction not only to the president’s proposals but to any good-faith negotiation at all. But sometime last year, things took a strange turn. 
To understand how this escalation happened, we need to return to Wikipedia:

In order for brinkmanship to be effective, the threats used are continuously escalated. However, a threat is not worth anything unless it is credible; at some point, the aggressive party may have to back up its claim to prove its commitment to action.

For the last year- but mostly all through Obama’s first term- the Republican refused to budge when it came to the budget. Austerity ( at least, selectively defined), they claimed, was the only way out of this national debt problem. With the impending automatic and across the board budget cuts called sequestration, that threat is very creditable indeed. 

How the nation could have found itself in such a mess is perhaps an example of the breakdown in the political system. With the defeat of their candidate in the election, the Republicans now find themselves in a bind, an inexcusable situation, largely of their own making.