Why Are Republicans Being Such Assholes?

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The $600 bonus unemployment payments put in place in March expire today, and let’s get this out of the way up front: the main reason for extending them is because there are millions of Americans who are out of work and they desperately need the money. There’s no reason to add to the anxiety of the COVID-19 pandemic itself by making them wonder if they’ll keep getting these payments.

That said, there’s another reason to extend the UI payments. I’m not the first to say this, or probably even the millionth, but if the payments are cut off it will devastate an already ravaged economy. Here is EPI’s estimate from a few weeks ago of what the payments are doing to keep the economy afloat:

We estimate that extending the $600 UI benefits through the middle of 2021 would provide an average quarterly boost to gross domestic product (GDP) of 3.7% and employment of 5.1 million workers.

Now, you can argue with EPI’s precise number. You can propose, say, a $400 UI benefit along with a repeat of the $1,200 stimulus checks. That’s all fine, and it ought to be an easy negotiation. It also ought to be a negotiation that took place a month ago, when it was obvious that we hadn’t beaten COVID-19 and continued support for the economy would be needed.

So why are Republicans hemming and hawing and putting off any action? After all, the president is a Republican. He’s already in trouble, and if the economy is in shambles in November he’ll obviously have no chance of winning no matter how many federal troops he sends into American cities to gin up riots. From a purely selfish perspective, Republicans ought to be in favor of doing anything they can to keep the economy in decent shape through the election.

So what’s going on? I can think of a few possibilities:

They are genuinely worried about creating even deeper deficits. For obvious reasons, I find this hard to believe.

They’ve given up on Trump. This is possible, but they still have their own elections to think about.

They’re holding out for goodies aimed at their base and are using the desperation of ordinary people as leverage to get Democrats to agree. Unfortunately, I have no problem believing this.

Whatever the reason, the whole thing is a disgrace. Ordinary people need this boost. The economy needs this boost. It will almost certainly do no damage in a period of near-zero interest rates. Why are Republicans acting so contemptibly?

sunset117 on July 26th, 2020 at 21:09 UTC »

Ted Cruz had the balls on one of the Sunday shows today to say that Nancy pelosi is holding things up bc she is looking for payouts for her wealthy blue state friends. These people have no shame and project at every opportunity.

technical_assistance on July 26th, 2020 at 19:46 UTC »

So why are Republicans hemming and hawing and putting off any action? ... Republicans ought to be in favor of doing anything they can to keep the economy in decent shape through the election.

So what’s going on? I can think of a few possibilities:

They are genuinely worried about creating even deeper deficits. For obvious reasons, I find this hard to believe.

They’ve given up on Trump. This is possible, but they still have their own elections to think about.

They’re holding out for goodies aimed at their base and are using the desperation of ordinary people as leverage to get Democrats to agree. Unfortunately, I have no problem believing this.

This assumes Republicans are competent. If they cared about the economy, they would be and would have been mandating masks and taking the coronavirus threat seriously. Doing that would have helped them politically, but they didn't.

So interpreting their rationale has to consider that it's inherently irrational. Maybe Trump really does think wearing a mask makes you look unmanly and he's willing to risk his reelection on that premise. Or maybe he thinks the anti-masker part of his base is worth destroying the economy for. Or maybe he's so incompetent he believes the above and that masks are ineffective and pointless and the virus will magically disappear.

Beyond that, the article fails to consider historic Republican hatred towards all forms of welfare, including unemployment. Here's an article that does:

GOP Hopes to Revive Economy by Making Life Harder for Unemployed

These benefits, Republicans believe or pretend to believe, make people lazy. It shouldn't be a surprise that they're being "assholes" about it. I'll always remember this quote from Republicans when they were trying to repeal Obamacare. It is a succinct demonstration of Republican attitudes towards assistance.

At a town hall earlier this week, Davidson received a question from a woman concerned that Republican lawmakers efforts to repeal Obama's Affordable Care Act would leave her son, an employee in the service industry, without insurance. The woman said her son had been without insurance for four years and was only able to obtain insurance after the Affordable Care Act expanded Medicaid. She cited her son as an example of "the working poor" and likened catastrophic insurance to "no insurance at all." Davidson's answer seemed to imply that those in the service industry did not have skills deserving of health insurance.

"Can you explain why my son and millions of others in his situation are not deserving of affordable, decent health care that has essential benefits so that he can stay healthy and continue working?" the woman asked Davidson during his town hall, referencing House Republicans' efforts to strip federal regulations requiring health care plans cover what the Affordable Care Act defined as essential health benefits (EHB).

According to Rep. Davidson, however, the problem wasn't so much Republican lawmakers' efforts to roll back health insurance coverage but her son's unwillingness to just find a better job with better insurance benefits. "OK, I don't know anything about your son," Rep. Davidson began. "But as you described him, his skills are focused in an industry that doesn't have the kind of options that you want him to have for health care. So, I don't believe that these taxpayers here are entitled to give that to him," said a congressional representative whose job, according to the Washington Post, entitles him to receive a taxpayer-funded subsidy that covers two-thirds of his health insurance premiums. "I believe he's got the opportunity to go earn those health benefits."

Republican ideology is cruel and irrational. They don't understand or are paid not to understand that health care makes workers more productive. They don't realize or are paid not to realize that expanding health care makes the system cheaper (as one can see in comparisons between the US and Europe). They would rather have their waiters serve them food while sick with coronavirus, tuberculosis, or any communicable disease you can think of, all the while being denied sick days. And Republicans couldn't care less about the cost in lives and personal and public health.

Compounding this potential problem, according to Wynia, is the phenomenon of “presenteeism,” or going to work when you shouldn’t. Service sector workers typically get few sick days, if any, and miss out on tips if they drop a shift, which is a big concern for epidemiologists every flu season, and an even bigger concern when there’s an outbreak. “There have been infectious disease outbreaks among workers in bars and so on in the past—not of COVID-19, but of other things like tuberculosis. So we've worried about that for a long time,” Wynia said.

This plays out not only in health care but virtually all Republican policies, as we are now all too well acquainted with in the Trump and coronavirus era.

nowhereman136 on July 26th, 2020 at 19:43 UTC »

Because their asshole behavior is rewarded