The Times Handles the Trump Tax Cut Framework with Kid Gloves

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The Tax-Cut Framework Won’t Create Jobs and Digs the Inequality Ditch even Deeper

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Part of Patriotism is Paying Taxes

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Right Wing Propaganda Tank IPI Likes the Trump Tax-Cuts-for-the-Rich “framework”

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Trump’s “Give the Rich a Break” Tax Plan

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Various congressional representatives held town hall meetings recently, and the news channels and print media were abuzz with the lively give-and-take, including shouting matches. See, e.g., House G.O.P. Members Face Voter Anger Over Budget, New York Times, Apr. 26, 2011; Republicans facing tough questions over Medicare overhaul in Budget Plan, Washington Post, Apr. 22, 2011.

The issue–the House’s adoption of the Ryan budget proposal and its clear agenda of overturning New Deal safety nets embodied in the current understanding of Medicaid, Social Security and Medicare.

Those at or near retirement are worried that the Ryan proposal will hurt everybody. The Ryan proposal comes with frequent disclaimers about protecting the already older population and needing to act now to protect our grandchildren, a clear effort to massage the message to appeal to current grandparents. See, e.g., House G.O.P. Members Face Voter Anger Over Budget, New York Times, Apr. 26, 2011 (noting Webster’s statement that “not one senior citizen is harmed by this budget” while implying that it is necessary to prevent grandchildren from “looking at a bankrupt country”); Congressional Republicans go home to mixed reveiws, CBS.com, Apr. 26, 2011 (noting North Carolina GOP Rep. Renee Ellmers’claim that “If you’re 55 and older, your Medicare and Social Security will not change”).

But the Ryan proposal clearly envisions mechanisms that would likely lead to decimation of these programs–either through turning them into limited vouchers (Medicare proposal); turning the funds over to the states to use as they see fit (Medicaid proposal) or limiting benefits (Social Security proposal) in ways that will –probably sooner rather than later– hurt everybody.

• These proposals take place in a context of expansive, concerted attacks on these “entitlement” programs, often failing to acknowledge the historic support for these programs or their foundation in the recognition that federal support is required to protect against the abject poverty and humiliating degradation that accompanied the Great Depression;
• Benefits for elderly and sick Americans are cut to provide savings to offset some of the loss of revenues from tax cuts for Big Business and the wealthy, both of whom already pay relatively low taxes, in what hardly seems a bargain to the working poor, the elderly or in fact the overwhelming majority of Americans who are not in the top 15% income or wealth distribution. (This in spite of Ryan’s claim that there is no huge tax cut for big corporations and the wealthy–he asserts that the proposed 25% rate is “in exchange for losing their tax shelters”. See, e.g., CBS.com Evening News coverage of Paul Ryan holding Wis. town meetings, at http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7363939n&tag=related;photovideo )
• In spite of the high cost for the vulnerable poor and elderly of these budget proposals, they don’t appear likely to achieve their proffered rationale of reducing debt and deficits–in fact, the CBO has said that the Ryan budget proposal will result in higher deficits and bigger debt burdens over the next decade.
• It appears shortsighted to wring one’s hands about a “bankrupt country” while considering only one potential solution, especially when that solution is highly detrimental to the most vulnerable populations, and without considering the full facts regarding the amount of debt, the ability of the U.S. to weaken the dollar further to aid unemployment and debt payment, the ability of the U.S. to raise taxes judiciously rather then merely cutting spending, or the ability of the U.S. to let the tax law play out as it is currently slated to do (with the Bush tax cuts that were extended 2 more years over their originally intended short life due to sunset in 2012). As Jim Johnson, a former Ryan supporter who has “grown increasingly disgusted” with Ryan noted, “[Ryan] says Medicare is unsustainable. I’m thinking, ‘Yeah, it’s because medical costs are out of control.’ …Why isn’t he attacking it at that level?” Congressional Republicans go home to mixed reviews, CBS News.com
• Any voucher system for health care will inevitably fail to cover increasing health care costs, resulting in rationing even the most basic health care by socio-economic class–the very problem that Medicare, Medicaid, and the limited health care reforms undertaken by the last Congress were intended to address. The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities concluded that out-of-pocket medical costs would skyrocket for low-income seniors; the Washington Post’s Fact Checker Glenn Kessler (in GOP Lawmakers tout Medicare reform by stretching a comparison to the health benefits they receive, Apr. 29, 2011) notes that the CBO analysis concluded that the Ryan Medicare system would pay only 32% of health care costs by 2030, compared to 70-75% if traditional Medicare remained in place.
• Addressing the problems in the U.S. health care system solely by market means that put the onus on health care recipients to seek cost-savings has failed miserably over the last forty years and cannot help but fail more spectacularly when the Medicaid backup is weakened and the nature of health care needs is such that one of the best antidotes to market problems (the only one permitted in radical market thinking that objects to regulatory safeguards)–informed consumers who can review options and select among competing providers–is simply not applicable. Car accident victims don’t shop for surgeons; cancer victims don’t know enough to select based on price; etc.
• The Ryan proposal appears one-sided in its decision to cut spending on potentially vulnerable populations rather than to address the means through which health care is provided or to consider ways to control profit-taking in the health care system. The market ideology of the proposers leaves many options that might work better off the table (single payer; tax on excessive compensation; revamping the non-profit hospital system; attaching strings to the R&D and other tax expenditures in the tax code; using the clout of a national system to negotiate better doctor and drug pricing for Medicare and Medicaid, etc.);
• Many of those states that would acquire more control over the use of Medicaid funds are controlled now, as is the House, by people who have announced their intent to cut taxes on the wealthy and business while cutting or taxing pensions and health benefits for public employees and cutting funds available for Medicaid and other poverty-directed programs; it is not a difficult leap to see the interrelationship of these trends;
• Plans to cut benefits for those who may enjoy them in the future pave the way in at least two ways for decisions shortly thereafter to cut benefits for those who currently enjoy them: first, by creating lowered expectations; second, by creating an unfair disparity that supports an “us against them” attitude between the current elderly and those who will get lesser benefits in the future. (Note that this resembles the way the right has encouraged an “us against them” attitude of private workers, who have been deprived of union benefits through the harsh anti-union tactics used by Big Business, against public employees, who have generally benefited in the past from more reasonable attitudes towards unions fostered in legislative bodies that have, in the past, understood the nature of the bargain that public employees make (which might be summarized as ‘work hard, get paid less than you could in the private sector, and accept later benefits in pensions and health care for lesser salary/percs now).

Is is surprising that left-leaning activist groups like Move-On point to the Ryan budget proposal as a “naked, unapologetic attack on working Americans for the sake of Big Insurance and the riches of the rich” (quote from Move-On email on this matter)?

Tags: GOP Budget Proposal, Health Care, House Budget Proposal, medicaid, medicare, Medicare vouchers, Paul Ryan, Renee Ellmers, social security, State Taxes, taxes on pensions, town hall meetings Comments (12) | Digg Facebook Twitter |

Bruce Bartlett’s December 15, 2009 piece, Inequality: A Problem?, states Bartlett’s agreement with Dalton Conley that

“the left should stop worrying so much about inequality per se–its costs are overstated, as well as the benefits of greater equality. Instead …
liberals should concentrate more on helping the poor and less on beating up
the rich.”

Now, before we even get into the inequality stuff, you’ll notice that the statement above is loaded with presuppositions. It pre-supposes that liberals are extraordinarily focused on “beating up the rich” and that they are not currently very interested in “helping the poor.” Further, it presupposes that whatever “beating up on the rich” involves, it cannot “help the poor.”

Are liberals focused on “beating up on the rich”? I expect Bartlett would point to bloggers (such as myself) as examples. I have rather persistently argued for higher taxation of the rich and super-rich through more progressive rates and elimination of the capital gains preference which results in low effective tax rates on those whose income is predominantly income from financial assets. The income tax changes over the last four decades have eroded progressivity–instead of the 70% or 90% rate that we had at times in the past on very high incomes, the super-rich with multimillions of adjusted gross income pay the same marginal rate as the merely rich who have more than about $350,000 annually. The rich and super-rich derive the most benefit from the biggest loopholes in the tax code, like the mortgage interest deduction, the charitable contribution deduction, and the property tax deduction. They are the ones who buy muni bonds and get to exclude the interest from income, so that the rate of return on munis is set with the rich as the targeted customer (high enough sp that the exclusion makes the return on munis (with no tax) better than the return on corporate bonds (after tax)). Is that line of argumentation “beating up on the rich”? No, quite assuredly it is not. The wealthy don’t merit punishment for being wealthy. But taxation is not punishment. Taxation is merely the exaction of appropriate tribute based on societal members’ ability to pay, to ensure that the state can continue to function appropriately in service to all its citizens. Making the case that the status quo is overly solicitous of the rich and super-rich is not “beating up” on the rich.

Are progressives not “helping the poor” and in fact beating up on the rich rather than focusing on the poor? No and No. There are lots of ways to help the poor, including volunteering, giving to charities, and others. Many progressives are engaged in all of those ways of helping the poor. We mentor in schools, give to food kitchens as well as to environmental organizations, donate canned foods at Christmas, and work in our communities for better schools, better transportion, better jobs, better shelters, less discrimination. But none of those are enough in a society that has become stressfully bipolar between the well-to-do and the rest (not to mention, the making it okay and the truly down-and-out). Progressives, that is, cannot easily help the poor and ignore the way that wealth has eroded the democratic society in which we all exist, because that erosion is eating away at the possibilities for the poor to pull themselves out of poverty.

Bartlett goes on to say:

I think he is right. I have never understood how I am worse off if
the top 1% of households increase their share of national wealth or income as long as the absolute level of wealth and income of the other 99% is
unchanged. It may be aesthetically displeasing, but it doesn’t impose any
actual costs on anyone as long as the pie is not fixed.”

(Beale here again) The growing income disparity is not merely aesthetically displeasing (which it is) or environmentally harmful (which it is, as the wealthy consume many times their share of the world’s resources in rambling from one multi-million mcmansion to another) or humiliating for many (which it is, especially for those growing numbers in the “servant” class who work at the whim of the wealthy and live in unsatisfactory conditions while watching the wealthy waste in a night what could feed their children for a year). It does impose costs, even if the pie is not fixed. Those costs include the long-term impact to broad-based growth when wealth becomes more and more concentrated in the hands of a very few. And one is worse off when the top 1% of the households increase their share of national wealth to the detriment of everyone else. A society with such wealth imbalances is a society that also has enormous power imbalances. Wealth creates power, and that power is almost invariably used to further the aims of those holding it. Democratic institutions are particularly vulnerable, since wealth and power permit the capture of agencies and legislatures, so that the institution is thwarted from serving the broader constitutency in order to do the bidding of the wealthy oligarchs who hold the reins to power. It is this sense in which the populist anger expressed by the teapartiers is most distressing–it is misdirected, seeing evil per se in government and good per se in “private enterprise” and unable to understand the important role of government in standing as protector between the private corporatocracy and citizens.

Bartlett continues:

[N]either does it follow that there is no limit to how much we can soak the
rich without average people suffering some of the consequences. We really
don’t want the rich spending all their time figuring out how to hide their
wealth from the tax man or engaging in conspicuous consumption; we’d rather that they invested their wealth in businesses that will increase their wealth but also create jobs and income for the rest of us, too.

Hmmm. First, we are nowhere near “soaking the rich” in this country. IN fact, we have been making sure, with almost every change to tax policy undertaken in the last four decades, that the rich sat high and dry and comfortable. Moving them down a notch or two to the benches on the same level with the rest of us won’t begin to soak them–it will, in fact, hardly be felt. Second, while we definitely don’t want the rich spending all their time hiding their wealth, telling them that they can just keep it all without paying a fair share of taxes is not the alternative. Decent enforcement rules will go a long way to solving the problem of hiding wealth–broker reporting, which most think is going to happen this year, will help, but restoring funding to the government’s collection efforts and requiring more audits of the wealthy than of the Earned Income Tax Credit would be the best ideas. (I’m not even so sure that I don’t want the wealthy engaging in conspicuous consumption. AT least that way there would be less to pass down to heirs and less possibility of sustainable oligarchy.) Taxing the wealthy moves the dollars to the government, which moves the dollars out into businesses that provide services the government buys, and then those businesses invest the dollars. I like that better than depending on the wealthy to invest and create jobs for the rest of us. I fear they are just as likely to invest as they so often have in the past–in emerging economies where they suck out the natural resources and leave those populations without jobs or much to show for their foreign input, without doing a thing to create jobs here either.

Farther on, Bartlett suggests taxes cannot assist a move to less inequality because their only effect is “by discouraging the rich from earning income.” There the Chicago School thinking comes out–the idea that taxes distort decisions, and if you tax the income of the rich, they just will do without the income. No one has yet satisfactorily explained why the rich don’t still like 50% or 65% of $X better than 0% of new $X. The substitution of leisure for income is a possibility, of course, but that would actually not be bad at all, if it succeeded in capping the amount of wealth for one family and created a gap into which someone else could step to earn money.

Finally, Bartlett suggests that we should do what Europe has done, suggesting that Europe has accepted the compromise of VATs as a conservative tax along with extensive social welfare spending from that tax. This is misleading, since Europe generally has a VAT as a supplement to the income tax (and, in the case of France at least, a bunch of other taxes as well). And it is disingenuous, since tax policies that Bartlett has supported (zero taxation of capital gains) or, apparently, VAT instead of an income tax, would not raise enough in revenues to fund the huge military obligations of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as an improved welfare state. Methinks Bartlett’s version of acceptable social welfare spending would be significantly lower than most progressives’.

There is a lot in Bartlett’s statement that is worrisome, but perhaps the most for me is the disregard for the impact of inordinate inequality on democracy. Most of us don’t think about democracy very often, and we seldom talk about it among diverse groups in ways that can enhance its institutions and its sustainability. A discussion of inequality that so completely disregards the impact of the kinds of gross inequalities that we are seeing more of in this country–where a CEO may earn in half a day what an average worker in his company earns in an entire year, where every single member of the national body that is most influential on our laws (the Senate) is in the highest bracket of the income tax and “rich” in any reasonable measure of the benefits and burdens of society that they bear– is itself cause for concern for our future.

Another writer this month had similar thoughts. Christopher Hayes ends his article on “The Great Leap”, a story of China and its growth and expansion as a world financial power, with the following paragraph comparing the trends in the U.S. and China.

We tend to view China as posing an alternative and threatening model for
the future, one that’s by turns seductive and repulsive, the source of envy and contempt. But after a while I wondered if we aren’t in some way converging with out supposed rival. China has managed the transition from a
repressive, authoritarian, impoverished country to an industrial, corporatist oligarchy by allowing a loud and raucous debate while also holding tightly onto power. Perhaps we are moving toward the same end from a democratic direction, the roiling public debate and political polarization obscuring the fact that power and money continue to collect and pool among an elite that increasingly views itself as besieged on all sides by a restive and ungrateful populace. Hayes, the Nation, Jan. 11/18, 2010, at 17.

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[cross-posted on ataxingmatter–see posting there for additional comments]

As some of you may know, I am one of the many people who eat a vegetarian diet. I don’t eat cows, pigs, fish, whales, sharks, chicken, turkey, sheep, wild game, tame game… As I sometimes say when people ask me about my diet, I eat everything you eat, except for a very short list of items–the critters that can move themselves from one place to another (or move their appendages) under their own propulsion.

(Note that we often have two words for animals that we eat–their live-form word –e.g., cow, sheep, pig– and their edible-corpse form word –e.g., beef, mutton, pork. That evolved when we borrowed the Romance language word for what we ate but kept the Germanic language word for the animals.)

It started when I was a child–I was one of those who would cut the meat into tiny pieces and then spread it all over my plate so it looked like I’d eaten it. The idea of eating a cow, with those beautiful liquid brown eyes, was repulsive. (My father came from a family with thirteen kids in the hills of Tennessee, so I’d seen cows up close.) I even took a whole piece of veal once and hid it behind the dining room cabinet (taking it out to the wastebasket after it dried)! I refused to eat the squirrel and venison that my dad brought home from hunting trips (mostly, if not always, somebody else’s kill). I even refused to let my cocker spaniel share in that dead stock.

But now that I’m an adult, why do I maintain that diet? I get asked that a lot.

Funny, nobody says (with shocked exression)–“Gee, you eat meat? Why would anyone ever want to eat a toxins-laden dead corpse of an animal that lived a horrendous life and suffered an agonizing death? ” But they do often ask–usually treating it as a good-natured tease about a wacky alternative diet–why I’d want to avoid eating corpses.

James McWilliams got me thinking about this again this morning, when I read his “Bellying up to environmentalism” in the Washington Post for Nov. 16, 2009, where he noted that we should be asking questions in the reverse, that make meateaters feel uncomfortable at defending their own meateating. After all, there’s really no good reason for eating meat other than that someone is so addicted to its taste that he or she can’t exert the willpower to do without it.

The whys for not eating meat, on the other hand, are legion. Let me just list a few here, from the mundane to the truly significant:

1. cooking is easier–throw veggies in a pot and steam them; throw veggies in a pot and make soup, throw veggies in a fry pan and fry them, throw beggies in a pot and bake them; and variants thereon

2. clean-up is a lot easier–none of that icky clinging greasy layer of animal fat on every pan

3. refrigerated leftover use is easier–throw the leftovers in a pot and steam them (etc. from one above) and there’s none of that congealed lard on top of the leftovers in the fridge

4. rotten vegetables in the fridge are less disgusting than rotten corpses in the fridge

5. a decent diet is generally considerably cheaper

6. the more people who adopt a vegetarian diet, the more people who are currently going hungry could be fed

• one of the many articles I’ve read said something that stuck with me (sorry, don’t have the cite)–that it takes the same resources to feed one meat-eater that it takes to feed about 80 vegetarians.
• That’s because of the huge waste as you use up primary foodstuffs to feed the animals that will be slaughtered, then use up primary energy stuffs to slaughter, process, ship and deliver the meat to the meat eater, compared to even transported vegetables (localvore, with vegetables, is even more saving of resources)

7. without meat-eating, there are no feedlots where animals literally eat and sleep out the remainder of their short lives in their own shit

8. you can have a small flock of hens who live out their natural lives with nice living conditions (indoor/outdoor)

• disclosure: I had one hen who lived to be 22; she was still laying eggs up until the week or so before her death from natural causes

9. Hens lay bigger and bigger eggs each year that they live past the first year w(hen most are slaughtered) and they still lay fairly regularly

• disclosure: 6 eggs every 7 days was typical in my experience

10. Even hens have personalities

• disclosure: when I lived in upstate New York, I had one named Gumption who loved to fly up to the top of a two-story house and survey her domain, and another named “kiss me” who would follow me around all day like a pet dog

11. Animals that we eat are as smart as–or smarter than–animals that we keep for pets (pigs compared to dogs, for example)

12. Animals care for their young and suffer when their young are taken from them (think dairy cattle and the young that are bred so that the mothers will give milk)

13. Some eating of animals is even more obnoxious than the norm (think “veal calves” that are taken and put in tiny sheds to they can fatten without any musculature development or “foie gras” where geese are fattened by having food stuffed down their throats with a tube)

14. Life is precious: there is no reason to sacrifice animal lives to lead a decent human life, so why do it?

15. Agribusiness–the main way that animals are raised and sold for meat–is an environmental nightmare

• use of fertilizers to grow the grain that is fed to the cattle that are fed to the humans results in polluted land, water and air and uses up petroleum and other resources
• consolidation results in long transportation (inhumane to animals; wasteful of oil and gas resources)
• the subsidies (including some tax expenditures) for agriculture have gotten out of control–costly, misdirected, ill-conceived, and essentially now a form of corporate welfare for huge agribusiness enterprises

16. A meatless diet is healthier for humans than a meat-based diet, so we could cut health-care costs by simply cutting out meat

17. The process of butchering animals is a cruel leftover from the dark ages–people who work in slaughterhouses are inured to suffering, and that may well spill over into their “normal” lives outside work

18. The process of butchering animals is itself a source of harm–

• sick animals are slaughtered, making it possible that eaters of that dead flesh will be sickened as well (mad cow disease);
• animals are slaughtered in the midst of their own excrement, and some of that excrement gets into the food chain (making people sick as well);
• the leftovers from the animal slaughter have to be gotten rid of somehow, leading to even more water, land and air pollution
• workers are exposed to awful conditions–not just the process of mercilessly killing animals day in and day out, but also the risk of infection and injury on the line

19. The use of antibiotics in animal feed (given to healthy and unhealthy animals alike) ensures that resistant strains will develop even more rapidly, while leaving excess antibiotics not absorbed by the animals to pass out in their urine and excrement and into the land and water to act as toxins to others (including fish and birds and humans) leading to additional environmental nightmares…

20. Agribusiness pig farms and cattle feedlots are a blight on any humans within their vicinity (as well as a disaster for the natural world, noted above under environmental problems) from the stench of the manure (that can pollute the countryside for miles around) to the ugliness of the barren, treeless manure-laden fields.

So what to do? Maybe we should enact an excise tax on all meat products, like a”sin” tax for sodas and sweets and cigarettes. Comments, anyone?

PS Arthur C. Clarke has a great sci fi short story, taking place some time in the future, when a more advanced civilization than ours is aghast at the purported discovery that their ancestors used to–cover the young ones’ ears–eat dead corpses of animals…..Clarke’s ideas were way ahead of his time in lots of ways.

Tags: agribusiness, corporate welfare, environmentalism, excise taxes, pollution, sin taxes, tax subsidies, taxes, vegetarianism Comments (31) | Digg Facebook Twitter |

by Linda Beale

Part of the reason for our ongoing Great Recession is that we have had so many measures in the tax code to favor home ownership that (i) banks started to think of mortgage securitization business as money growing on trees and (ii) homeowners started to think of their homes as money-growing trees. The bubble burst when the whole house of cards almost came tumbling down–it was revealed that banks had lent money through sub-prime mortgages to people who couldn’t afford to make the payments, that people were hoodwinked into getting subprime mortgages (at higher costs) that could have afforded a regular mortgage, that house prices could not just keeping climbing.

Nobody liked the way the “market correction” worked–foreclosures, evictions, job losses and home losses heaped on top of each other. Made especially bad when banks foreclosed on individuals for falling short on payments, refused to accept “short sales”, and then ended up letting the houses deteriorate and selling them for much less in foreclosure sales. Made worse when we watched the bailout drama unfold, with investment banks and companies like AIG (investment banks’ friendly insurer and credit default contract counterparty) saved with trillions of dollars of federal tax money on the line, while home foreclosures for ordinary people continued.

Congress couldn’t get the will to pass a bill to permit modification of home loans in bankruptcy–the one bill that would have done the most to save current homeowners from losing their homes and the social/economic disruption such a loss causes.

But somehow it managed, as part of the economic stimulus bill, to pass a tax cuts to encourage people to buy homes who hadn’t owned one before. I thought that bill was problematic from the beginning. First, it was not an ineffective stimulus, in that it was not as effective as, and much more costly than, permitting mortgage loans to be modified (i.e., principal to be reduced) in bankruptcy. Second, it was not fair–those who’d bought homes earlier and were now struggling with underwater mortgages got no help, but someone who managed to put together a deal made possible by the many foreclosed properties would also get a boost from tax funding.

At least, I thought, it’s temporary–so we won’t be saddled with another one of those monster tax expenditures that gets built into the Code and pricing expectations and is well nigh impossible to repeal, like the home mortgage interest deduction and the home gain exclusion provisions that permanently distort investment decisions in favor of housing over many other valuable capital expenditures–such as college and post-graduate education.

Well, it looks like that was wrong. Congress is close to enacting an extension and expansion, trying to save the crisis caused in part by the housing bubble by creating incentives to invest in more housing. Today (Nov. 2), the Senate voted 85-2 to invoke cloture on H.R. 3548, the Worker, Homeownership, and Business Act. It will extend the deadline for the $8000 credit through the end of April 2010. But it will also provide a new credit to existing homeowners to help them buy a different house. See BNA Daily Tax RealTime (nov. 2, 2009 at 7:20pm). Presumably that’s aimed at those who’ve relocated and have to sell and maybe have rented for a few years but are still unable to sell for full price. See this blog for more info, which also notes that the expansion will also raise income limits to $225,000 for married couples.

Egads! I can see why real estate professionals and people who will get the windfall would support this. But it is hard to believe that it makes sense to provide more tax breaks for housing, especially when it is only to a select group that just happens to be in a position to purchase this year, who are already likely to get pretty darned good deals anyway, and especially if it includes well-off couples who make almost a quarter million annually (the current credit phases out starting at $150,000 for couples)? Especially when this extension alone will cost us another $17 billion or so.

They’re also extending and expanding the provision allowing carrybacks of business losses. Before, it was just open to small businesses. Now, there will be an NOL carryback for five years for all businesses, so long as they had losses in either 2008 or 2009.

The only good thing in this bill, as far as I can see, is the provision for extension of unemployment benefits.

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