Congress doing little work to create jobs

Thursday, November 10, 2011

I see in Rep. Guinta’s biweekly column a lesson on New Hampshire’s nonprofit or charities.

He states the American Jobs Act has a tax killer for charities. I have not found it yet, but am still looking. I am exceedingly pleased a Republican in the House of Representatives has read the act since the decision has been made to ignore it and let it die. As a result, the president is feeding it piecemeal to the Senate and getting a 100 percent rejection from the Republican Senators. Since Sen. Kelly Ayotte was one of those, she refused job help in New Hampshire for more than 3,000 jobs for police, firefighters and teachers.

Can we afford to turn those jobs away?

That was only one of three the president presented to the Senate and Ayotte voted against all of them. Why? It might defeat their No. 1 goal of making the president a one-term president. They would rather see the country get deeper into depression than help President Barack Obama in any little way.

I am old enough to remember the Great Depression. Initially, we lived in a small, rural, farming town in the eastern part of Nebraska. My dad owned and ran an auto garage until he was paid in pigs, chickens, eggs, etc. and could not use those to order and pay for parts. The people had to have a car or truck that ran, so he did his best to help. We moved to Colorado where Dad was employed in an auto garage at a barely livable salary. That allowed me to work, and my first job was at age 11. My next job was a fantastic increase in pay as I was earning 10 cents per hour for 10 hour days, six days a week.

Some of my cousins lived in the western part of Nebraska where the depression was felt even more. Visiting them brought into view children who were starving and parents who were not much better off. The father of a family had to sustain himself for work as it was often for just a day. Kids were starving. Without proper nourishment, the brain suffers for life. Today, we have millions who have been out of work for so long that they cannot receive unemployment insurance money. That means that after 70 years, we are back to kids starving and fathers out of work with little chance of getting a job. Is this the America we want? What is Congress’ answer? It is to cut back food stamps – as one Senator said, “We can not afford them!”

The current House of Representatives complain the Senate will not take up their bills they claim are job bills. They are bills to do away with regulations for banks that got us into this depression in 2008. Or there is a bill to reduce regulations for coal fired power plants. Then, those companies could add toxic wastes to our environment and increase their profits, which are higher today than they have ever been.

Or they want to reduce taxes on big companies so they can hire workers. Those companies and the banks are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash now, and they are not hiring. Why? This is because there is no demand for their products. Why? People do not have jobs to be able to buy the products. Why don’t they have jobs? It is because the “do nothing” Congress will not even consider the American Jobs Act that they have had for over a month. They claim no time when they work on bills to re-establish our country’s motto or for the seventh time this year pass a bill against abortion.

They have time to go on vacation – again – this week. One week off for every three weeks appearing at work to do nothing would be nice. How do we get jobs like that?

Keith Cordes

Bedford