Republicans filibustered a Democratic bill to restore unemployment benefits to more than one million Americans because they were standing on principle, lawmakers said.
"People, if you pay 'em for years and years, they won't look for a job," said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), putting his feelings in perhaps the starkest terms of a number of senators interviewed by HuffPost.
"This creates no job. It's just a check -- you know that," he said.
"That is a huge expenditure. What we need to do is spend that money on retraining these people that are unemployed -- help them for a few months and get them retrained and get them back in the job market," Shelby added. "That's the problem."
"Republicans actually have principles," said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who argued that it didn't matter to him that Democrats were likely to use GOP opposition to the extension of benefits as a campaign issue. "I certainly ran because we're mortgaging our children's future. We're bankrupting this nation."The Huffington Post
Republicans Explain They Filibustered Unemployment Aid On Principle
Michael McAuliff
4 comments:
If Shelby is serious about ending baked-in unemployment, then he should support expanded public sector hiring.
Dan this was out from GOPer Thune last week:
http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/194650-gop-senator-proposes-ui-amendment-with-new-obamacare-exemption
Wants to give out tax breaks for hiring long term unemployed, etc...
But he knows nothing about business NO one will hire anyone they do not already need... not for tax breaks or any other reason other than increased orders in which case you dont need the tax incentives in the first place...
rsp,
Maybe someone should have asked Shelby, what are these jobs he's speaking of, that it only takes a few months to retrain people to be ready to do? because from the sounds of it, it will more than likely just be another dose of welfare for corporations who are now in the business of managing the poor. This is the kind of nonsense we've got in the UK at the moment, private companies are being paid thousands of pounds per person, to "retrain" them, when there was an investigation into this, they found that the unemployed did better if they had gone nowhere near these scam artists, they make people do the most ridiculous things and the end results are, as the report put it 'worse than doing nothing', and this has cost billions.
It would have been more beneficial to use the billions to increase the amount the unemployed get, rather than have them jump through hoops to satisfy the media who love to use the unemployed as a punch bag.
So if it's anything like we've seen from other neoliberal governments in the west, it will just be another way of putting public funds into corporate hands.
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