Thanks, Frank and Marcy!
Want to thank someone on Capitol Hill?
How about Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), who introduced S.1517, the 21st Century Works Progress Administration (WPA) Act? Or Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA), John Reed (D-RI), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Mark Begich (D-AK) who cosponsored S. 1517?
Lautenberg’s WPA 2.0 authorizes $250 billion to employ individuals who have been unemployed longer than 60 days. Workers would be hired to work a host of public works projects, including residential and commercial building weatherization; highway, bridge and rail repairs; school, library and firehouse construction; and manufacturing projects. The program would be paid for through an excise tax on millionaires of 5.4 percent.
Or maybe Marcy Kaptur (D-OH)?
Last year Congresswoman Kaptur introduced the 21st Century Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Act, H.R. 494. Her bill has 30 cosponsors. The $16 billion proposal envisions a renewed emphasis on putting unemployed and underemployed Americans to work immediately planting trees, ending erosion, preventing forest fires and massive flooding and improving rural communities. The bill also calls for more housing, medical and transportation assistance.
Notably both Tom Harkin and Marcy Kaptur are the senior Democrats on their respective chamber’s Appropriations Committee. There they have been fighting for food stamps, unemployment benefits, Medicaid and job training — all key programs for the jobless.
How Congress will spend $3.5 to $4.0 trillion during the next fiscal year? Well, I can’t think of a better way than shoe-horning the concepts contained in S. 1517 and H.R. 494 into one of those must-pass appropriations bills.
Click here to send a letter to Congress urging their support of the 21st Century WPA Act. And click here to urge their support of the 21st Century CCC Act.
To have an immediate impact on those bills’ prospects, THANK the Senators and Members of Congress who are sponsoring and cosponsoring them. After all, UCubed has been advocating for these measures for the last three years.
And THANK them publicly! Start by clicking here.
I was suggesting the other day that rather than collect unemployment and waste away – at least find them a job doing something that keeps them used to getting up and going somewhere at 8am and feel useful – and/or where they can keep up to date with technology. To work even 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. Being totally disconnected from the business world pushes us further down on the list of desirables.
The red areas of in North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska (a single conuty) are NOT population centers. They correlate to the Indian Reservations. The consistent red area in southern SD is the Pine Ridge Reservation. Unemployment in these rural reservations has been a long standing problem. According to a speech Clinton gave in 1999 the unemployment on the Pine Ridge Reservation was 75%.