This deal isn't worth a bucket of warm spit, as my mother used to say.
Arthur Delaney at Huffington Post:
House Dems To Biden: 'One Year Of Unemployment Benefits For Two Years Of Tax Breaks For The Rich?'
The programs provide up to 73 weeks of federally-funded benefits for workers who exhaust 26 weeks of state benefits. The average weekly benefit is about $300, and the total cost of a yearlong reauthorization is roughly $60 billion. Republicans and conservative Democrats ostensibly concerned about the deficit impact of the benefits have blocked several attempts to renew them in the past couple weeks, but they've signaled they will relent if the benefits are attached to the even-costlier tax cuts for the rich.
Some 800,000 laid off workers have already received cutoff notices, and another 1.2 million will stop receiving benefits by the end of the month unless Congress reauthorizes the recently-lapsed programs..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/08/house-dems-biden-tax-cut-deal_n_794150.htmlIn other words, please curl up in your cardboard box and die. We wouldn't want to upset the bond market, would we?
............
All this money for war, for banks, for big business, and nothing for the people getting buried by the economic fallout.
Bah, humbug.
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/all-bets-are-without-real-unemploymen