[Peace-discuss] NYTimes.com Article: Workers Held Hostage

[Barbara Dyskant]

Hi, Here is the second article I'm copying today-- this time about the
treatment of domestic workers vs. the wealthy.  

Peace,
Barbara


This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by bdyskant at earthlink.net.

Workers Held Hostage

February 19, 2002 

By PAUL KRUGMAN


 

Does life imitate art, or what? Last weekend's box office
was dominated by a movie in which Denzel Washington takes
an emergency room hostage to secure treatment for his dying
son. Last week's major political event, though it went
largely unnoticed by the general public, was also a hostage
drama: House Republicans blocked vital aid to the nation's
most vulnerable workers, and have refused to release it
unless they secure passage of a dying stimulus plan. The
plan, you won't be surprised to learn, consists almost
entirely of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. 

Here's how the blackmail scheme works. U.S. unemployment
insurance, unlike benefits in many other advanced
countries, has a sharp cutoff: 26 weeks and you're out.
This cutoff can be rationalized as tough love; arguably the
American system, by giving workers no choice other than to
find new jobs, has helped prevent the emergence of a
European-style class of permanent unemployed. But it's a
very harsh rule to impose during recessions, when new jobs
are simply not available. 

And that's the current situation. Last week 80,000 workers
reached the end of their benefits; the Center on Budget and
Policy Priorities estimates that two million workers will
have exhausted their insurance by June. 

Fortunately, in practice the rule is relaxed in hard times.
When recession strikes, Congress invariably acts to extend
unemployment benefits. During last fall's stimulus debate,
everyone favored a 13-week extension. True, both sides
tried to tie that extension to other measures. But everyone
expected that in the end Congress would extend benefits
whatever the status of other stimulus proposals. Indeed,
the Senate passed an extension by unanimous voice vote. 

But the hard men of the House leadership refuse to allow a
clean vote on unemployment benefits. Instead they continue
to insist that it's their way or no way: they won't allow a
vote on benefits extension except as part of a bill that
mainly consists of tax cuts for corporations and families
in upper tax brackets, pretty much identical to the failed
stimulus bills of the fall. And they rammed that bill
through last Thursday. 

Let's leave aside, for a moment, the economic merits of
those tax cuts. What's really striking about this tactic is
its sheer bloody-mindedness: the House leadership is
willing to impose pain on some of the most vulnerable
people in the country, desperate families whose
breadwinners have been unable to find jobs, in order to
push a divisive, partisan agenda. 

And for what it's worth, that agenda is also bad economics.
Last month the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office
reviewed a range of potential stimulus measures, including
all the elements in the latest House bill. Sure enough, the
bill consists largely of the very measures - accelerated
tax cuts for upper brackets, reductions in the alternative
minimum tax on corporations - that the C.B.O. concluded
would be least effective. 

What these proposed tax cuts have in common, of course, is
that they deliver not a penny of relief to the great
majority of American families. 

But isn't the House leadership's behavior just politics as
usual? No, it isn't. Politics as usual is trying to attach
goodies for yourself to bills that provide goodies to other
people. Everyone does that. But extending unemployment
insurance in a recession is so standard - and refusing to
do so is so cruel - that the House action takes the tax-cut
crusade to a whole new level of fanaticism. 

Put it this way: At first, ordinary workers were told that
they would benefit directly from lower taxes - remember
those "tax families"? Great effort was devoted to obscuring
the simple truth that last year's tax cut offered crumbs
for ordinary families, but huge breaks for the wealthy. 

Then ordinary workers were told that they should support
bills like the two House stimulus plans from the fall -
bills that offered retroactive tax cuts to corporations,
big tax breaks to families with high incomes, and nothing
at all to two-thirds of the population - because those
bills would create jobs. After all, tax cuts are part of
the war on terrorism, or something. 

But now tax-cut advocates have moved from promises to
threats. Support tax cuts for the elite, the House
leadership says, or we'll cut off your unemployment
benefits. 

So what's next? Support tax cuts or we'll break your legs?


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/19/opinion/19KRUG.html?ex=1015113951&ei=1&en=
323f4cf457b2c510



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