There Will be Blood

[DeistPaladin]

Because the unemployed do not want unemployment benefits in the first place. They want jobs. Politicians are elected to Capitol Hill to do what they can to encourage employment, not unemployment (which is part of the reason the electorate painted the political map red in the last election cycle).

They do want unemployment benefits when they can't find jobs, which is the whole point of the program. In terms of "bang for the buck", extending unemployment benefits is the best stimulus program. Tax cuts for the wealthy is the worst.

And the jobs programs cooked up by the Democrats made as much sense as taking water from one part of the lake and pouring it into another and pretending to have accomplished something meaningful.

We have an infrastructure that's crumbling apart, so it does make sense to spend resources fixing it, never mind the economic benefits of the jobs program. Given that the economy was in a free fall after 8 years of Republican mismanagement, the shaky recovery of today does seem like an accomplishment.

And the Bush tax cuts were for nearly all taxpayers, not this ad hoc category of "the rich."

Just most of the tax cuts went to the rich.

(P.S. If Pelosi is right, that unemployment benefits "create jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name," then why does the lame duck Congress not simply extend unemployment benefits with unused stimulus money, rather than legislating further deficit increases?)

I've been asking "why don't the Democrats...?" for several years now.

The law in the employment-based health insurance market prior to [health care reform] already specified that

But she couldn't get health insurance on her own. And she would have died.

Moreover, the fact that you do not already know the answer reveals an unwillingness to conceive seriously the alternative to your favoured position; a responsible electorate is informed by the strongest arguments of both sides on political issues, not indoctrinated by the talking points of one side and rhetorical straw men of its opposition.

Have you got any links? You'll have to pardon me for not knowing about these plans because the only conservative suggestions I've heard are "tort reform" and "interstate competition", neither of which actually address the root problem that the foxes are in charge of the chicken coup (for profit health insurance companies running health insurance). If such plans exist, its not for lack of listening that I don't know about them.

No, the Tea Party movement is opposed to that, too. It wants the federal government to be as uninvolved in the private lives of "we the people" as possible, limited to the powers enumerated in the Constitution—none of which regard anything about the bedrooms of Americans.

Perhaps you and I are speaking of two different Tea Parties. The one I'm talking about has fielded some of the most brazenly anti-choice candidates yet seen on the political landscape, one of which is now my senator.

Yeah, the Republicans of the 1990s and 2000s who were Democrat Lite in their spending orgy—which Democrats supported and the Clinton administration signed off on—the sort of Republicans that gave rise to the very Tea Party we are talking about, a movement that reached a boiling point during the Bush administration and voted many of those incumbents out.

The Republican "spending orgy" was defense spending (which the Tea Party has taken off the table for cuts), the wars (which conservatives supported) and the tax cuts (which the Tea Party supports). Pray tell, where are your hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts going to come from?

Last time I checked, the Clinton administration was among the most fiscally responsible in the last 30 years.

In 2006 and 2008, it was Bush's incompetence that helped progressives elect Democrat majorities in Congress. If these elections were about a groundswell of conservative outrage against Bush's spending, I never heard about it. It's only today that some Tea Partiers disavow Bush and even now I'm not hearing anything of substance regarding where exactly his frivolous spending was.