The Importance of Extending Both the Payroll Tax Cut and Emergency Unemployment Benefits

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2011/11/ui_payroll_infographic.html

This week Congress will vote on extending and expanding the temporary payroll tax cut for 160 million American workers. And it may soon consider extending emergency unemployment benefits that support those workers and local economies hurt most by the Great Recession. Failure to extend these two critical measures by December 31 will depress U.S. economic output by about 1 percent and raise our risk of slipping back into recession. Congress must vote to extend both measures through 2012.
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Extending the emergency unemployment benefits that support those workers and local economies hurt most by the Great Recession is a good thing.
But extending the payroll tax cut is short sighted and will come back to bite us down the road. The payroll tax cut is just more diddling with he symptoms so they can say they are doing something while we swirl around the drain. Also it cuts into the monies Medicare and Social Security have to use. Yeah, yeah I know S/S has $2.4 Trillion, but Social Security system is pay-as-you-go system and that's the cushion, the insurance that the money is there for payout if it is needed. It is not needed yet.

The real fix is to get out Living Wage Jobs back into this country. That is the root cause of our financial problems in the first place - A shortage of Living Wage Jobs. Just jobs ain't a gonna cut it. Living Wage Jobs!

Taking away the money that is supposed to go to Social Security means that we will see more and more banner headlines in newspaper s that the Social Security Funds are experiencing a short fall.

This all plays into the Big Shots that run this country eying the Social Security Fund, which is a separate fund outside the General Budget and currently has a 2.1 trillion dollars surplus This is a fact you really hear mentioned in the M$M - but believe me, this under funding will be mentioned any time the subject of Social Security comes up.

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