The U.S. Senate passed a $15 billion “jobs bill” Feb. 24. The money allocated amounts to a little more than one month’s worth of the federal budget allocations for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars alone for the current fiscal year—not counting the hundreds of billions of additional dollars that will be squandered on other military outlays. (nationalpriorities.org)
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According to Bloomberg News, Feb. 24, the centerpiece of the bill is “a $13 billion plan to fight unemployment by offering companies a one-year holiday from paying a 6.2 percent Social Security payroll tax for each new worker who meets [a] 60-day unemployed criteria.”
The bill gives an additional tax break to small businesses allowing them to write off more investment costs.
Despite an acute and deepening jobs crisis, the Senate measure does not include an unemployment extension. Unless Congress extends unemployment benefits past the Feb. 28 deadline, 2.7 million people stand to lose unemployment benefits by April.
To add insult to injury, the Senate also failed to pass continuation of the federal subsidy of COBRA. This subsidy has reduced the costs to workers of maintaining health care coverage after losing their jobs. Without extension of this subsidy, unemployed workers who previously had health care insurance will have to pay the full costs of continued coverage.
The U.S. House passed a $150 billion jobs plan in December with an emphasis on jobs-creating infrastructure projects. Large-scale public works projects are urgently needed both to provide jobs and to meet the growing need for bridge repair and road maintenance, high-speed rail construction, non-polluting energy sources, repairing and constructing new schools and hospitals and much more.
In lieu of such measures, the Senate bill provides $2 billion to help state and local governments issue bonds to pay for construction projects. It also transfers $19.5 billion in tax revenue into the government’s highway trust fund that is short of cash because of reduced gas-tax revenue. For accounting reasons, that money isn’t counted against the bill’s cost.
The House is expected to vote on the paltry Senate bill by the end of the week. Needless to say, the Democrat-controlled Congress will have to do much better than this if a dent is to be made in the suffering now plaguing working people throughout the country.
