Thursday, Dec. 9, 2010

With 9.6-percent unemployment and the White House and Congress in Democratic control in the waning weeks of this session, it seems hard to believe we’re even having this lame duck face-off over extending unemployment benefits.

Nancy Pelosi’s House has a 77-seat advantage. Harry Reid’s Senate features a 56-seat majority. And President Barack Obama heads the executive branch in the White House.

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office evaluated policy options to solve this problem and concluded the most effective way Washington can stimulate the economy would be to increase aid to the unemployed.

Broke people can’t afford to save.

If the government returns our money, we turn around and spend it, boosting consumer demand.

Busier companies create jobs as they grow.

At the other end of the spectrum, the CBO identifies tax cuts as the least effective of 11 approaches studied.

Republicans, such as the new Illinois senator, want to extend tax cuts “no matter what,” but unemployment benefits only if “they’re paid for” — a test the GOP never attaches to the former.

For 30 years, from the early 1950s until the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, the richest 10 percent of Americans held steady at controlling about one third of the wealth.

Then the graph line takes off like a space launch.

The super rich amassed more resources until by 2007, that 10 percent controlled about half of U.S. wealth.

George W. Bush’s two terms were boom times for tycoons, if no one else.

In the first five years after Bush’s tax cuts, which especially benefited rich people, the wealthiest Americans saw their income ratchet up every year, averaging more than 10 percent per annum each year between 2002 and 2007.

Pay for the hollowed-out middle class flatlined.

The poor lost ground.

What kind of country do we want to be?

One where even the deck stacked in their favor isn’t enough?

Yet Congress, brushing aside campaign concern over exploding deficits considers taking on another $700 billion in debt to help citizens earning more than $250,000 a year get even more help in hope something trickles down to the rest of us.

Where are all the jobs this scheme should have produced previous times.

Why would they pick the least effective option over the most effective option to address chronic unemployment?