Numerous politicians and oil industry officials have claimed the BP oil catastrophe growing in the Gulf of Mexico is “unprecedented.” From BP CEO Tony Hayward, who called his company’s environmental crime an “unprecedented accident,” to Admiral Thad Allen, U.S. Coast Guard, who called it an “unprecedented anomalous event,” officials and pundits have given the impression that the consequences of this catastrophe could not have been predicted. In a Congressional oversight hearing on the apocalyptic disaster on Thursday, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) even argued the country should respond to this “unprecedented” event by making sure “that we continue to produce oil here in the states.”

Watch a compilation prepared by ThinkProgress:

On Thursday, May 27, Rep. George Miller (D-CA) responded to the myth that this catastrophe was unprecedented and thus unforeseeable:

Every time we have a catastrophic event like this involving British Petroleum or other parts of the oil and gas industry, we’re told that this is an unpredictable cascade of unforeseeable errors, that this is unprecedented, that nobody could have foreseen this. This is sort of like the bankers on Wall Street. Nobody could have foreseen the risks that they engineered themselves, so nobody’s responsible. I don’t believe this was some “black swan” or “perfect storm” event. There wasn’t something that could not have been foreseen. And I don’t think this is something you can promise will never happen again.

Like the rest of the oil industry, BP has a long record of tragic, extraordinary environmental disasters, stretching from Alaska to Nigeria. And this particular disaster is not unprecedented in size, in the kind of accident, nor in the methods used to respond. There have been dozens of oil well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico, including 39 since 2007, and the worst oil blowout in history in 1979. What makes this catastrophe new is its location in the fertile and fragile ecosystem of the northern Gulf, and the depth at which the well was drilled, increasing the dangers. But this event is yet another tragic reminder of the truth of George Santayana’s dire maxim: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Cross-posted on the Wonk Room.

According to a USA Today analysis that came out earlier this month, Americans paid their lowest share in taxes in nearly sixty years in 2009. At the same time, as this year’s annual Economic Report of the President pointed out, “in recent years nearly half of all income — including both wages and salaries and nonlabor income — has gone to 10 percent of families.” “The top 1 percent of families now receive nearly 25 percent of income, up from less than 10 percent in the 1970s,” the report said.

Given that income concentration has gotten more and more severe recently and that the country has to be proactive in addressing its long-term deficits, it makes sense to increase taxes on those at the top of the income scale. And evidently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agrees. Speaking at the Brookings Institution yesterday, Clinton said that, particularly with the high unemployment the country is facing, “the rich are not paying their fair share” in taxes:

“The rich are not paying their fair share in any nation that is facing the kind of employment issues (the United States is), whether it’s individual, corporate, whatever the taxation forms are,” she said…“Brazil has the highest tax-to-GDP rate in the Western Hemisphere and guess what — it’s growing like crazy. And the rich are getting richer, but they’re pulling people out of poverty,” she said. “There is a certain formula there that used to work for us until we abandoned it, to our regret in my opinion.”

Clinton made sure to emphasize that “I’m not speaking for the administration, so I’ll preface that with a very clear caveat.”

Speaking of taxing the rich, the Senate, when it comes back from the Memorial Day recess, will contend with an extenders bill passed by the House today. One of the ways in which the bill’s spending is partially offset is by closing a tax loophole that allows wealthy hedge fund and private equity managers to pay the lower capital gains rate on the income they receive from the investors whose money they manage, instead of paying standard income tax rates.

As I’ve explained before, it’s simply unjustifiable to let this loophole stay in place, as it allows money managers who regularly make hundreds of millions annually to pay lower tax rates than people who make far less money, for no good reason. Here’s an illustration of the situation that the loophole allows:

At this point, simple revenue raisers that only affect the super-wealthy should be embraced with ease. But of course, that’s not the case, and Congress is twisting itself into knots to mitigate the tax increase, suggesting various ways to carve out certain people or subject only a portion of their income to the higher tax. But Clinton is right. The country needs to find places to raise revenues, and leaving loopholes in place that allow the ultra-wealthy to pay lower taxes than their secretaries is simply not fair.

Today, after spending the last few days running around in an effort to scrounge up enough support, the House of Representatives plans to vote on an extenders bill that, among its many provisions, extends unemployment benefits through the end of November.

The final bill is a scaled down version of the original legislation, which extended jobless benefits through the end of the year and included Medicaid assistance to states and expanded COBRA health insurance subsidies for jobless workers. But those were jettisoned in the desperate quest for votes, thus making the bill cheaper.

However, the House did manage, in a separate bill authorizing the Defense Department for 2011, to approve funding for a second engine for the F-35 fighter that both the Pentagon and the White House have said is a big waste of money:

The House of Representatives, defying the Pentagon for a fourth straight year and a presidential veto threat, voted to preserve a second engine program for the multinational F-35 fighter jet…The House would provide $485 million next year to continue work on the engine being built by a joint venture of General Electric Co and Rolls-Royce Group Plc.

An amendment stripping the engine funding from the defense authorization bill, which is also slated for final passage today, failed by a 193-231 vote.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates called the second engine “costly and unnecessary,” adding that “every dollar additional to the budget that we have to put into the F-35 is a dollar taken from something else that the troops may need.” Gates has repeatedly recommended that Obama veto the defense spending bill if it includes the engine funding. Obama himself has said, “think about it: hundreds of millions of dollars for an alternate second engine for the Joint Strike Fighter when one reliable engine will do just fine.”

Can you imagine another agency coming before Congress, expressly asking that a particular program be cut because its unnecessary, and having that request denied? It’s a completely absurd situation. To its credit, the Senate Armed Services Committee refused to fund the second engine, but proponents of the program are already pushing for it to remain alive in conference committee.

Meanwhile, with the unemployment rate at 9.9 percent and long-term unemployment at a record high, it’s a Herculean effort to get Congress to extend unemployment benefits. And COBRA subsidies are cast aside due to cost concerns. In fact, we’ve seen repeated filibusters of jobless benefit extensions that were characterized as costing too much.

The Senate is already planning to leave for the Memorial Day break without approving an extension, meaning that 1.2 million workers will see their jobless benefits expire this weekend. And money for a fighter engine that the Pentagon neither wants or needs continues to flow.