Sharron Angle Claims Unemployment Insurance 'Really Doesn't Benefit Anyone'
In an interview this Wednesday, Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle heightened her criticisms of unemployment insurance, insisting that the benefits program to help the jobless ended up benefiting nobody.Does Angle and her wacky far right-wing supporters realize the unemployed were people who had a job, which means they paid taxes toward supporting safety net programs like unemployment. Angle and conservatives are arguing people do not have the right to benefits they paid for. Angle and her supporters seem to have nothing but malicious contempt for hard working Americas who have done nothing wrong except get laid off from their jobs.
Sitting down with conservative radio talk show host Heidi Harris, Angle once again addressed a topic that brought her a bit of political heat -- including a hard-hitting ad from her opponent Harry Reid-- not too long ago.
"People don't want to be unemployed," she explained. "They want to have real, full-time, permanent jobs with a future. That's what they want, and we need to create that climate in Washington, D.C. that encourages businesses to create those full-time, permanent jobs with a future, and all [Rep.] Shelley Berkeley and [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid want to do is put a band-aid on this by extending unemployment, which really doesn't benefit anyone. What happens is of course that your skills stagnate. You become demoralized yourself, you know, feeling that I can't ever get a job, and these are not the solutions to the problem. We have real solutions, but they won't look at the real solutions."
This is a fresh twist in Angle's relatively robust campaign against unemployment insurance. Prior to her appearance with Harris, the Tea Party favorite had argued that such benefits made the jobless "spoiled" in their dependency on the government. On other occasions she's stressed that unemployment insurance should be cut so as to compel people to go look for work.
Angle say we need to get back to the Constitution and the Founder's original intent. There are lots of problems with a 21st century society going back to the way they did things before the telephone was invented, but one thing Angle and her oddball cheerleaders should do is study a little history - Sharron Angle Channels Bleeding Heart of Thomas Jefferson
In a recent interview, Nevada Tea Party candidate for Senate, Sharron Angle, claimed that her far right wing beliefs mirror those of the Founding Fathers. (When asked about Harry Reid’s claim that she is too conservative, Angle replied, “I’m sure that they probably said that about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. And truly, when you look at the Constitution and our founding fathers and their writings, the things that made this country great, you might draw those conclusions: That they were conservative.”) Of course, this is nothing new for Angle – like other Tea Partiers (see my previous post), she seems to have a fetish about comparing herself with the Founding Fathers and misquoting Thomas Jefferson. Back in March she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, "They say, 'You're too conservative.' Was Thomas Jefferson too conservative? I'm tired of some people calling me wacky."
Wacky, huh? Well, Sharron, you do raise an interesting question, and I’ll get back to that in a little bit.
First, let’s just go back to last month and get a good handle on Angle’s Jeffersonian credentials. On July 22, Angle signed a pledge to the American Family Business Institute (www.nodeathtax.org – yeah, I think they’re kind of a single issue organization) to completely abolish the inheritance tax. Surely, the gist of all of Jefferson’s writings (or at least the general mystique of his legend in Tea Partiers’ eyes) indicate that he would have supported Angle’s “Death Tax Repeal Pledge,” right? But he did write a little something that might be applicable to this situation:
“If the overgrown wealth of an individual be deemed dangerous to the State, the best corrective is the law of equal inheritance to all in equal degree; and the better, as this enforces a law of nature, while extra-taxation violates it.”
Look at that! He is concerned about “extra-taxation!” That sounds like Tea Party rhetoric to me, so I guess Sharron is right – but wait, what’s that part before it? Whoa! Did he say what I think he said? An individual’s “overgrown wealth” might be “dangerous to the state,” and should be corrected? Perhaps he foresaw the huge role that money plays in our political system today. (Really, this pretty much summarizes standard Tea Party dogma, does it not?)
His prescription is to establish limits on inheritance: “equal inheritance to all in equal degree.” In other words, Jefferson supported the concept of an inheritance tax. And to keep inheritance “equal to all in equal degree,” I’m guessing the result would be some pretty heavy taxation in a lot of cases. Such a law could arguably redistribute wealth on a far grander scale than any government program proposed or already in existence.
If crazies like Angle want to claim the ideological mantle of the Founders shouldn't they first learn what the Founders actually thought. Jefferson's idea of taxing wealthy estates does go beyond anything her opponent Harry Reid has called for, but that seems to be Angle's game. She lies about Thomas Jefferson and Harry Reid to con the public into voting for her and her bizarre UnAmerican agenda.
