A solid opportunity to set about rebuilding both America’s crumbling infrastructure, and its Middle Class, is being squelched rather than seized.
President Obama is trying to enact the $60-billion Rebuild America Jobs Act, which would put thousands of unemployed Americans to work rebuilding unstable and collapsing roads, bridges and tunnels that cost us all millions and endanger lives nationwide. A win-win situation if ever there was one…right?
Apparently not, not for today’s version of the Republican Party; because in order to avoid adding to the deficit, this win-win initiative would be funded by a highly targeted tax increase.
Okay, so as much as you may hate Taxes - Here’s The Thing.
The tax hike that would totally fund this desperately needed win-win initiative, is in fact a seven tenths of one percent increase, only on those Americans with personal incomes of more than one million dollars a year.
Is that clear? Just for the sake of repetition, what we have here is a Republican Party that is fighting to prevent a 0.007% tax increase on millionaires, rather than creating jobs for thousands of construction and other workers, and upgrading dangerously dilapidated bridges, roads and tunnels nationwide in the process.
No matter how you feel about Taxes, President Obama, or the government helping folks get back to work - there’s still got to be a part of you that wants to count on you and your loved ones getting to and from work and other places for many years to come, without major risk of dying in a bridge collapse, or some other disastrous infrastructure failure.
There must also part of you that doesn’t like hypocrites - like the flip-flopping Republican Senators voting against this bill for political reasons, even though they’ve already publicly proclaimed an urgent need for infrastructure rebuilding.
The GOP hypocrisy and empty rhetoric about Jobs is even harder to swallow. In fact, their “alternative” Jobs plan doesn’t rebuild the Middle Class, roads and bridges, or anything else. What it does is, it makes the rich richer - presumably in hopes they’ll look in the mirror someday and become the “Job Creators” that Republicans comically keep calling them, despite so many years of ample evidence to the contrary.
Contrast that with President Obama’s original American Jobs Act proposal, an ambitious plan to get millions of people back to work, rebuild America’s infrastructure, and rescue the jobs of hundreds of thousands of teachers, police and firefighters.
But because the plan was funded on a foundation of Tax Fairness - the kind we had back when America got things fixed, kept them running and did okay - it was rejected outright by today’s version of the Republican Party.
In an all-out effort to compromise and get at least some jobs saved and created; and in hopes of at least beginning to rebuild America’s infrastructure; the president broke that original American Jobs Act down into smaller pieces. He has been traveling the country for weeks trying to rally support for a scaled-back set of what are still win-win initiatives.
In return, Republican Party leaders have accused him of being out on the “campaign” trail - even though what he is campaigning for is nothing more or less than the restoration of the Middle Class, and the rebuilding of America.
When he calls out GOP leaders like House Speaker Boehner and Senate Minority Leader McConnell for their consistent hypocrisy and obstruction on the Jobs front, the president is attacked as “divisive”.
The fact of the matter is that the President of the United States has come up with a credible plan to get millions of people working and fix a lot of what’s broken in America. He offers a fair way of paying for it, without adding to the deficit.
But it appears he won’t be able to turn the plan into reality, not even this latest infrastructure-rebuilding piece of it. Because today’s version of the Republican Party is willing to see you lose your job, your health coverage, your unemployment benefits, your retirement savings, your home…all in the name of not raising taxes on the very richest of mega-rich Americans - not even by seven tenths of one percent.
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