Rand Paul-- This Year's Avatar Of Compassionate Conservatism And Tough Love

While congressional Republicans-- with their 9% job approval rating-- boasted about obstructing President Obama at every turn, the Administration was imploring Congress to extend unemployment benefits to the longterm unemployed.

Rand Paul on Fox News Sunday today said he opposes extending benefits-- but it's because, he says, he loves unemployed workers and just wants to do what's right for them. Extending benefits, he insists, would be doing them a "disservice… When you allow people to be on unemployment insurance for 99 weeks, you're causing them to become part of this perpetual unemployed group in our economy." On Thursday, Robert Reich proposed a cold-hearted slap in the face to the unemployed and to low-wage workers. Probably unable to comprehend simple Randian tough love, Reich had the nerve to propose fairness! "As low-wage work proliferates in America," he wrote, "so-called takers are working as hard if not harder than anyone else, and often at more than one job. Yet they’re still not making it because the twin forces of globalization and technological change have reduced their bargaining power and undermined their economic standing-- while bestowing ever greater benefits on a comparative few with the right education and connections (and whose parents are often best able to secure these advantages for them)." Instead, Reich proposes tough love for the plutocratic classes Rand Paul carries water for:

Without some redistribution, the losers are likely to react in ways that could hurt the economy. They’ll demand protection from global markets they believe are taking away good jobs, and even from certain technological advances that threaten to displace them (rather than smash the machines, as did England’s 19th-century Luddites, they’ll seek regulations that preserve the old jobs).

Without some redistribution, our ever-increasing number of low-wage workers won’t have enough money to keep the economy going. (This is one reason why the current recovery has been so anemic.)

And without some redistribution, America’s growing army of low-wage workers may fall prey to demagogues on the right or left who offer convenient scapegoats for their frustrations.

One way we already redistribute is through the Earned Income Tax Credit, a wage subsidy for the working poor, which, at about $60 billion a year, is the nation’s largest anti-poverty program. It’s like a reverse income tax-- larger at the bottom of the wage scale (now around $3,000 for incomes around $20,000) and gradually tapering off as incomes rise (vanishing at around $35,000).

The EITC subsidy should be enlarged and extended further up the wage scale before tapering off.



How to pay for this? By cutting subsidies and special tax breaks for the oil and gas industries, big agribusiness, military contractors, hedge-fund and private-equity partners, and Wall Street banks. And by capping individual tax deductions (deductions are the economic equivalent of government subsidies) for gold-plated health care plans, lavish business junkets and interest on giant mortgages.

In other words, we can finance much of this redistribution to the working poor by ending unnecessary redistributions to the wealthy.

Earlier today, Digby posited that Paul, who reminds her of the 'umble Uriah Heep, is encouraging the long-term unemployed to seek jobs in crime and prostitution (since they can't legally sell their children into slavery or themselves into indentured servitude, the ideal conservative solution).

It's this twisted Randroid sanctimony that really gets to me. It's bad enough that this creep thinks the unemployed are parasites and moochers. But he has the brass balls to adopt a disgustingly unctuous "compassionate" tone to suggest that he's following Christian teachings by throwing them out on the street.

Few people know that before Rand Paul started his unlicensed ophthalmology in Bowling Green in 1993 he was briefly a member of the British art rock/heavy metal fusion band named for his favorite literary character. His favorite Heep song, of course, was the one about the unemployed: "Easy Living." See if you can pick Rand out in the darkness: