Senate Fights For Billionaire Fund Managers’ Tax Breaks, Blocks Jobless Aid

[marmar]

from In These Times:



Senate Fights For Billionaire Fund Managers’ Tax Breaks, Blocks Jobless Aid

Thursday
June 17
12:32 am

By Art Levine


Key Democrats on Wednesday abandoned the latest pretense that they cared more about helping the jobless than they do about protecting tax breaks for Wall Street fund managers. Despite official jobless rates of nearly 10 percent -- and close to 40 percent if you count the under-employed in areas like Washington's impoverished Anacostia neighborhood a few miles from Capitol Hill -- a dozen Democratic Senators joined with Republicans to block an extension of unemployment benefits, aid to states and even job-creating tax breaks for businesses.

The upshot of the Senate's inaction is that 325,000 people have already lost benefits since the extension didn't pass by June 1, and by the end of the month, if Congress fails to act, about 1.25 million will be denied the unemployment assistance they're owed.

As Andrew Stettner, the deputy director of the National Employment Law Project, told In These Times, "We're letting the economy go off a cliff." Unemployment assistance also boosts the economy by leading to direct spending by the unemployed. .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6116/senate_fights_for_billionaire_fund_managers_tax_breaks_blocks_jobless_/

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

1. D.I.S.G.U.S.T.I.N.G. !!!!!!!!!! nt

[Angry Dragon]

2. To hell with the people

we need wall street and corporations more.
I get so sick of this garbage.

[indepat]

3. If only every American could come to grips with the fact that welfare for the wealthy

is, in fact, the most insidious of all welfare, and taxing someone's income as if it were long-term capital gains is not only duplicitous, disingenuous, immoral, and unfair to taxpayers, it is just plain crooked chicanery. Wake up America and smell the rotten goulash our corrupt and venal corporatist Congress keeps dishing up and shoving down our collective throats. :P

[inna]

4. Class warfare in action.

[leftstreet]

5. Who are these "key" "dozen" Democratic senators?

:shrug:

[inna]

6. And this:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4431379

:nuke: