{"id":197541,"date":"2008-01-26T20:31:00","date_gmt":"2008-01-27T01:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/01\/26\/senate-democrats-mull-adding-retirees-to-rebate-plan-extending-jobless-benefits\/"},"modified":"2008-01-26T20:31:00","modified_gmt":"2008-01-27T01:31:00","slug":"senate-democrats-mull-adding-retirees-to-rebate-plan-extending-jobless-benefits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/01\/26\/senate-democrats-mull-adding-retirees-to-rebate-plan-extending-jobless-benefits\/","title":{"rendered":"Senate Democrats Mull Adding Retirees to Rebate Plan, Extending Jobless Benefits"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Senate Democrats are looking about, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/ap.google.com\/article\/ALeqM5h19_YeGzwzlmJhx42iIA7nJF0_UAD8UDD8800\">giving retirees tax rebates, extending unemployment benefits, boosting heating subsidies for the poor and temporarily increasing food stamp payments<\/a>.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This is <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">great<\/span> politics!!!, and here&#8217;s why:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Republican or Democrat, the Senate is smarting at having <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">not been involved in the negociations<\/span>, and there is a bipartisan consensus, in fact a near unanimous consensus that the Senate&#8217;s prerogatives should be respected in that body.<\/li>\n<li>Getting more money to retirees is a politically powerful thing, because <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">senior citizens vote<\/span>.<\/li>\n<li>There is widespread political support for extending unemployment benefits in the real (i.e. outside of DC) world.<\/li>\n<li>Increasing food stamp payments will be seen as being good for American farmers, who figure prominently in a number of red states.<\/li>\n<li>Heating subsidies for the poor is also very popular nationwide.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>On a policy level, if they were to strike the business tax credits, which will take months to have any effect, and are very inefficient, that would be a good thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Senate Democrats are looking about, &#8220;giving retirees tax rebates, extending unemployment benefits, boosting heating subsidies for the poor and temporarily increasing food stamp payments.&#8221; This is great politics!!!, and here&#8217;s why: Republican or Democrat, the Senate is smarting at having not been involved in the negociations, and there is a bipartisan consensus, in fact a &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,998,973,978,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-congress","category-economy","category-politics","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197541"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}