maddowblog: Republican budget priority: Not you

[babylonsister]

http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2010/11/29/5543896-republican-budget-priority-not-you

Republican budget priority: Not you
By Laura Conaway
Mon Nov 29, 2010 10:06 AM EST



(The number of people unemployed 27 weeks or longer, since the government began keeping records in 1948.)


The lame-duck Congress is back today, with a couple of big financial deadlines. The first, extending unemployment benefits for folks out of work longer than six months, hits tomorrow. Congress has never failed to extend the unemployment insurance when joblessness was this high. If lawmakers give unemployed Americans the cold shoulder again -- as they did earlier this month, with a near-lockstep no from Republicans -- then some 2 million people will lose the very small checks that are helping them patch together bare necessities for their families this winter.

As anyone who has ever checked their pay stub knows, we all pay into the unemployment system, which is why it's called unemployment insurance. Unemployment is not a handout, however much conservatives like to cast it as one.

The second big deadline for Congress has to do with the Bush tax cuts, which expire at the end of the year. With 33,000 of his poorest constituents on the verge of losing their benefits, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky sends his sympathy but says it's the Bush tax cuts that matter to him, including the ones for families making over $250,000 a year. "The top priority of most Americans is to create jobs and get the economy moving," Sen. McConnell says. "And the single best thing we could do in Washington to achieve that goal is to prevent a tax hike that's about to hit every taxpayer and hundreds of thousands of small businesses at the stroke of Midnight on December 31st. "

You can see in the Washington Post chart below who wins in the Republican proposal.

[GoCubsGo]

1. So, Rachel, what else is new?

Same shit, different day. But, K & R because what she says can't be repeated enough.

[flpoljunkie]

2. This 'same sh*it' bears repeating. We need Maddow and others to hammer it like the R's hammer

their 'small business' tax cut lies.

[wiggs]

3. What's missing in the last graph is a correlation between income brackets and

political donations. The last two brackets is where Tom Delay expected most of the donations to come from that would keep the gop in power for 100 years. How many individuals in the 1 million plus category give to gop vs dems and what is the average amount?

Wouldn't that make the case mostly strongly? For every 100,000 dollar tax break, how much goes back to the political system that created it in the first place? Obviously, there's a lot more available from the 103,835 chunk than the 6,349 chunk....