Nothing was more predictable than Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson and all five of the state’s Republican congressmen demanding Democratic Gov. Tony Evers slash unemployment benefits to force the unemployed back to work in poorly paid jobs just as President Biden’s national economic recovery is starting to work.
It’s the classic battle between Republicans and Democrats that’s been going on since the 1930s when Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal began creating government programs to lift working Americans out of the devastating 25% unemployment of the Great Depression. Roosevelt succeeded and became the most popular president in American history winning four straight elections.
Many may not know Wisconsin’s contribution to that historic economic recovery. Wisconsin created the first state unemployment insurance program in 1932, which went nationwide as part of Roosevelt’s Social Security Act of 1935. Republicans have attacked unemployment benefits and Social Security ever since as socialism.
GOP’s Contempt for Working Class
The conflict reflects the starkly different attitudes between Republicans and Democrats toward the working class. Many wealthy Republicans have contempt for working Americans as fundamentally lazy people who would rather live off the government than work. Democrats believe working in good-paying jobs to provide for their families has always been a source of pride and dignity for American workers. But with a federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour that hasn’t been raised since 2009, those jobs are hard to find.
Republicans claim their sour view of humanity is proven by employers complaining about a “worker shortage” because they’re not flooded with applications for their low-paid fast food and retail jobs as the economy starts reopening under Biden. Seriously, do Republicans really want to cut short Biden’s emergency stimulus program to restore the booming American economy destroyed by his predecessor when recovery has barely begun?
That’s a trick question. Of course, they do. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell recently declared the Republican Senate was 100% focused on blocking Biden’s agenda. “What we have in the United States Senate is total unity from Susan Collins to Ted Cruz in opposition to what the new Biden administration is trying to do to this country,” McConnell said.
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Decent Wages, Benefits
Elected Republicans may want jobless Americans to continue to be so miserable under Biden they turn against Democrats in the midterms. But it’s not what most Americans elected Biden to do with the largest presidential vote in history. There’s absolutely no shortage of workers. More than eight million Americans whose jobs disappeared under the previous president are still looking for work. If workers aren’t applying for job openings under those conditions, employers may have to resort to paying decent wages and benefits. That’s how the economy works.
Republicans have a very different solution. They want to force the unemployed back to the good old days of the early 1930s when employees had to work for whatever employers wanted to pay them. They want to eliminate government benefits enabling the unemployed to survive. It’s the Republican version of those joke signs in office cubicles: “The daily lashings will continue until morale improves.”
There are plenty of reasons other than sloth and bare-bones survival benefits workers aren’t going back to the terrible, low-paying jobs they used to have. Restaurants are slowly increasing their pay about a dollar an hour over pre-pandemic levels. But rapidly expanding warehouses full of all those on-line products pay far more, $26 an hour on average. Many attractive job changes require advanced training that would expand under Biden’s American Jobs Plan. Biden’s also right to expand the concept of infrastructure needed for the economy of the future. An improved child-care infrastructure is critical to allow many single mothers and two-income families to return to work. In April as Biden’s economic revival began, the number of women employed or looking for work fell by 64,000.
The New Support-Any-Crazy-Thing-Trump-Says Republican Party is no longer remotely conservative. All it has in common with Republicans historically is the party’s devotion to cutting taxes for its own wealthy donors. That’s ironic because raising taxes on the wealthy is the most popular provision of Biden’s widely popular jobs plan among the white working-class voters Trump attracted to the party. A recent poll by the National Republican Congressional Committee found that support for Biden’s jobs plan in battleground districts grew by six points to 56% when voters were told it would be paid for “by raising corporate taxes and raising taxes on the wealthiest families.”
The reason white working-class Trump supporters favor raising taxes on the wealthy is hilarious. They foolishly believed the defeated president’s lies that he was on their side even as he passed his only legislative achievement—the $2 trillion tax cut of 2017 that overwhelmingly went to multimillion-dollar corporations and wealthy individuals including Trump and his family. No one has ever had a lower opinion of the white working class that supported him than Trump himself.
