Well, it’s official. The president will sign the tax cut deal into law this afternoon.
The 99ers are getting nothing for Christmas, while the White House and the Tea Party congratulate themselves on extending tax cuts that don’t create jobs or stimulate the economy, because the rich don’t spend tax cuts — but nothing at all that will help those Americans who have exhausted their 99 weeks of unemployment benefits.
Without bold, direct action to prevent it, the ranks of those Americans will grow. In the coming years, we will watch more and more Americans slide into an economic oblivion, from which many won’t return without help. Conservatives’ libel of millions of unemployed Americans notwithstanding, if we simply stand by and do nothing as a country to stop this from happening, it will say more about us as a nation than it will about the millions of Americans we are now still choosing to abandon in this economic crisis.
We can and must fight to make sure that millions of Americans impacted by the ongoing shortage of jobs are not abandoned to lives of poverty and desperation. We must demand direct investment in putting Americans back to work — doing work that country needs done — and we must demand investment enough to match the size and seriousness of the economic and unemployment crises.
That is, if we actually want to be the country we still seem to want to claim that we are.
