Welcome to your Friday open thread. Today is a special Friday, it’s Friday the 13th! I hope only good luck finds you today.
I like this guy, Jared Bernstein, Chief Economic Advisor to the Vice President.
John Boehner wants a lot of people to lose their jobs.
We were awfully surprised to hear Rep. Boehner come out for killing jobs en masse in his own state and district by stopping the Recovery Act on last Sunday’s news shows.
Though we’re sure he didn’t know it, the Congressman is advocating to kill the expansion of the Butler County Community Health Center and bring some of the twenty-five highway projects across the district to a grinding halt. Across the state of Ohio, he said that approximately 4 million working families should get an unexpected cut in their paycheck as the Making Work Pay tax credit disappears, unemployed workers should go without unemployment benefits, and major Ohio road projects like the US-33 Nelsonville Bypass project and the Cleveland Innerbelt Modernization project should be stalled or stopped. Oh, and some of the more than 100 clean energy Recovery projects employing workers across the state should be shut down.
That would be the direct consequence of his suggestion that we shut down the Recovery Act: “There’s still about $400 billion or $500 billion of the stimulus plan that has not been spent. Why don’t we stop it?” Now if you have been following this blog, you know that the notion there is “$400 billion or $500 billion” in Recovery Act funding unspent couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, we’re right on track to hit the goal set when the Recovery Act passed: that 70% of the $787 billion in funds would be “outlaid” or provided in tax benefits by September 30, 2010. But you don’t have to take our word for it – independent fact-checker Politifact.com recently rated Rep. Boehner’s claim flat-out false. As they noted:
[R]ight off the bat, Boehner’s $400 billion to $500 billion figure is much too high.
But then they go on to say:
[W]e think it’s misleading to refer to even that lower number as “unspent” stimulus, because much of the $292 billion has been obligated, even though it has not been paid out.
One’s of the right’s big talking points is that there are unspent stimulus funds. Those are actually funds put aside for the middle-class tax cuts. Ezra Klein notes that since the recession began in 2007, we’ve lost 8M jobs. Only 41,000 jobs have been lost since the stimulus went into effect.
Remember how George W. Bush is the worst president ever? Today’s Republicans make him look good in comparison. Former Bush aide Michael Gerson criticizes the push by today’s Republicans to repeal the 14th amendment.
Today’s dispute over birthright citizenship reveals the immigration debate in its starkest form. Usually, opponents of illegal immigration speak of giving lawbreakers what they deserve. But this does not apply in the case of an infant. Consider two newborn babies at, say, Parkland Hospital in Dallas. One is the child of citizens, the other of illegal immigrants. Critics of birthright citizenship look at the child of immigrants and feel . . . disturbed? Outraged? But why? Do they see a child somehow tainted by illegality? That hardly seems fair. A burden on resources? No more than any other poor child. An alien lacking allegiance? How could they possibly know? Why not a soldier, or an entrepreneur, or, as the Constitution specifically permits, a president?
For nearly a century and a half, Americans have taken the view that these two children at Parkland start their lives as equals. They acquire their rights not because of their parentage or their bloodline or the permission of politicians but because they are born in the United States.
The radical, humane vision of the 14th Amendment can be put another way: No child born in America can be judged unworthy by John Boehner, because each is his equal.
It’s scary to think it could have been worse. Bush was a moderating influence over Cheney? Oy.