Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
On Wednesday night, a bare-bones measure to keep federally funded unemployment insurance checks headed to the long-term unemployed failed in the Senate. Moderate Republican U.S. Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine had signed on to vote for cloture on the $34 billion bill. But without Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., who passed away earlier in the week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., once again found himself stuck at 59 votes.
By the time Byrd’s replacement is in place, in mid-July, two million Americans will have lost their benefits, and the bill extending them will have languished for some 11 weeks.
Economists insist it should not be like this. Benefits for the jobless remain one of the most effective forms of stimulus. In the words of Peter Orszag, head of the Office of Management and Budget, they are “[one of the best] dollar-for-dollar economic stabilizers that we have.” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moodys.com, estimates that they generate $1.61 of stimulus for every dollar spent. Moreover, expanding unemployment insurance is wildly popular, even among conservatives.
Poll after poll shows that a vast majority of Americans support giving aid to the laid-off. And on Capitol Hill, even the most stringent deficit hawks do not object to the unemployment benefits themselves. They object to expanding the deficit to pay for them, despite worries among economists across the ideological spectrum that the economy is faltering and the government needs to continue its support.
Wednesday night’s failed cloture vote is just the latest in a long line of disappointments and failures around unemployment insurance. For the past nine months, the U.S. Senate has devoted hours of floor time and hundreds of hours of behind-the-scenes negotiations to ensuring that the government continues to support those left unemployed by the worst labor-market recession since the Great Depression. And for the past nine months, every bill — every extension, every jobs package — has faced staunch opposition from Republicans. Repeatedly, the Senate has had to turn to short-term stopgap measures rather than more permanent extensions. In the words of one aide, “it is beyond frustrating,” particularly since the measures are so noncontroversial. “Frustrating” has become the touchword for advocates of UI — and particularly for the unemployed.
Read more at The Iowa Independent’s sister site, The Washington Independent.
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