Republicans Think Only The Rich Deserve Help

The following three paragraphs are from the Los Angeles Times:

"About 15% of U.S. households — 17.4 million families — lacked enough money to feed themselves at some point last year, according to a new U.S. Department of Agriculture report.

Released Monday, the study also found that 6.8 million of these households — with as many as 1 million children — had ongoing financial problems that forced them to miss meals regularly.

The number of these "food insecure" homes, or households that had a tough time providing enough food for their members, stayed somewhat steady from 2008 to 2009. But that number was more than triple compared with 2006, before the recession brought double-digit unemployment."


While the rich and the Wall Street bankers are making record profits, these figures show that the rest of the country is still deeply mired in recession.   Hunger has tripled, millions are still out of work, and wages are stagnant for those working and middle class workers that are lucky enough to still have jobs (and many of those jobs are not secure since outsourcing continues unabated).

It's hard to blame the American voters for punishing Democrats in the recent election.   They had put the Democrats in office to fix the economy that George Bush and his cohorts had broken.   But all the Democrats offered were some rather tepid and wholly insufficient action.   They didn't have either the cohesion or the political courage to do what was really necessary to put a dent in the recession.

So now we have the Republicans taking over the House of Representatives and much stronger in the Senate (where they no longer need Blue Dog Democrats to help them sustain a filibuster).   This means the recession will continue and probably get worse, since the Republicans have yet to offer any plans or policies that will help ordinary Americans -- especially those in financial trouble.

The Republicans have already killed a bill that would punish companies that continue to outsource American jobs, and there is no reason to believe they will change that policy.   They are also opposed to any new extension of unemployment benefits, against making it easier to join a union, opposed to extending health care coverage to uninsured Americans, in favor of cutting Social Security benefits, and oppose any new stimulus plan to create new jobs in this country.   You can bet they will also oppose any new spending for the poor.

So what is their plan to improve the economy?   Just cut the deficit.   But they are not even serious about that because one of the first things they want to do is extend the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2% of Americans (the only people in America that don't need help).   And they don't care that this would increase the deficit, because they have decided that giving the richest Americans more money is the most important thing they could do.

And they're not willing to compromise.   Obama has offered to extend the cuts for the rich for a couple of years while making the cuts for 98% of Americans permanent.   They refuse to do that.   Obama has also offered to give the rich their tax cuts if the Republicans agree to unemployment insurance extensions for those who lost their jobs.   The Republicans say no to this also.   According to their weird math, extending unemployment benefits would increase the deficit, but giving huge tax cuts to the richest Americans would not.

It has become obvious that the Republicans only want to help the rich (because that's where they get their campaign funds and getting re-elected is more important than helping their fellow Americans).   They still are trying to pass the lie that giving more money to rich people will help the economy (although it never has and never will since money does not "trickle down in a capitalist economy -- it flows upward).

If they really wanted to help the economy they would put more money in the hands of poor and working class people -- people who would have to spend it.   It has been shown that tax cuts produce only 10-40 cents of economic activity for each dollar cut (a poor stimulus effect), while unemployment benefits produce 70-1.90 cents of economic activity for each dollar spent (a much more robust stimulus effect).

But the Republican leaders have been bought and paid for by the richest Americans and the corporations, and those are the only people they want to help.