POLITICS - Citizen Lives Paying for GOP Dogma

"GOP playing games with people’s lives" Editorial, Santa Maria Times 4/7/2010

Excerpt

The federal government’s jobless benefits program is on life support, and it appears that Republicans in Congress are prepared to pull the plug.

Let’s travel back in time, briefly, to the end of February, when Jim Bunning, a former major league baseball pitcher and current Republican senator from Kentucky, effectively blocked a 30-day extension of unemployment benefits.

Bunning’s obfuscating effort was based on his belief that extending the benefits program involved more deficit spending, and as a stalwart member of the GOP and a fiscal conservative, he is opposed to a bigger deficit than the federal government already carries.

Bunning finally relented, but not before a full verbal assault on the media, and some not-so-subtle prodding from fellow Republicans, who apparently explained how punishing the poor for the sins of the rich might somehow tarnish the GOP’s image come November.

How could members of any political party justify cutting off jobless benefits for hundreds of thousands of some of this nation’s hardest-working families, so as to rein in deficit spending, without a corresponding penalty for, say, major banks and other financial institutions, which common sense tells us are far better equipped to cope with a loss of income?

That question apparently will remain unanswered, at least from the GOP side of the aisle in the Senate, because party members blocked a $9 billion measure to extend jobless benefits for at least another month - then left for their two-week spring break, during which time, the benefits program will expire, and more than 400,000 unemployed Americans are losing their last line of life support as you read these words.

The GOP blocking maneuver was the result of Republicans’ stated belief that more deficit spending cannot be tolerated, and that such policies are paving the road to national ruin.

All noble sentiments, to be sure. But we wonder where that line of reasoning and logic was hiding during the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency, when the GOP enthusiastically supported the president’s tax-cut proposal, which turned a multi-billion-dollar budget surplus that the Bush administration inherited into a massive, and growing deficit.