This week, Florida lawmakers plan to vote on a bill that would dramatically cut both state and federal unemployment insurance, making the state’s already meager unemployment benefits the most restrictive in the nation. Even while they pursue massive tax breaks for corporations, Republican lawmakers are moving forward on legislation that would shorten state unemployment benefits from the 75-year national standard of 26 weeks to 20 weeks. The proposed change would also reduce federal benefits by thirteen weeks, effectively cutting jobless benefits twice.

According to the National Employment Law Project, the proposed reforms would leave the state’s one million unemployed workers “with much less economic protection than unemployed workers in any other state in the country.” Gov. Rick Scott (R) has endorsed the House’s bill, telling lawmakers that it advances his goal of limiting eligibility for unemployment benefits.

Since his corporate-funded inauguration in January, Scott and the Florida GOP have proposed a variety of reforms that “cast jobless workers in Florida as lazy, shiftless drug addicts” and would reduce and undermine unemployment insurance in the Sunshine State. In the past two months, Scott and his conservative allies have proposed legislation that would:

– Require jobless workers who had been receiving unemployment benefits for more than twelve weeks to work at community colleges.

– Force unemployed workers receiving benefits to accept low-paying jobs.

– Mandate volunteer service from jobless workers.

– Administer drug tests to unemployed workers receiving benefits.

— Reject an extended grace period on federal loans Florida received to pay jobless benefits. Instead, Scott wants to immediately reduce jobless benefits and begin paying back Florida’s debt to the federal government.

Despite their pro-growth, business-friendly rhetoric, the Florida GOP’s dismantling of Florida’s unemployment insurance could actually derail the state’s economic recovery. A new study from the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy shows that since the start of the recession, unemployment benefits have been a “key stimulus” — adding more than $9 billion into the state’s beleaguered economy. And George Wentworth of the National Employment Law Project argues that instead of cutting unemployment benefits, Florida should be taking advantage of federal stimulus dollars to modernize its unemployment insurance system, which is largely inaccessible to the state’s large population of temporary and low-wage workers.

But Scott has failed to pursue these necessary, and effective, reforms, instead lavishing more than $2.5 billion in tax expenditures on corporations. But Floridians are now pushing back against this corporate, right-wing agenda. Tomorrow, two days before the expected vote on the bill, thousands will take to the streets in rallies across the state to urge “state legislators to reject budget cuts and invest in Floridians again.”

– Kevin Donohoe

The nation has witnessed “record numbers” of American families fall out of the middle class since the start of the Great Recession. The combination of lost jobs and millions of home foreclosures has left countless Americans “homeless and hungry for the first time in their lives.”

But the latest faces of poverty are those of American children, as “it is estimated the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25 percent.” These children will be “the largest American generation to be raised in hard times since the Great Depression”:

The government considers a family of four to be impoverished if they take in less than $22,000 a year. Based on that standard, and government projections of unemployment, it is estimated the poverty rate for kids in this country will soon hit 25 percent. Those children would be the largest American generation to be raised in hard times since the Great Depression.[...]

Nationwide, 14 million children were in poverty before the Great Recession. Now, the U.S. Census tells us its 16 million — up two million in two years. That is the fastest fall for the middle class since the government started counting 51 years ago.

Rather than bolster the safety net beneath this staggering number of children, House Republicans took their budget scissors to it in the continuing resolution they passed last week. By drastically slashing programs including Head Start services and the Nutrition program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the GOP cut off thousands of children from vital food packages; 218,000 children from comprehensive health, educational, and family support; 975,000 low-income students from academic support; 5 million children from access to anti-poverty services; and leave “in the lurch thousands of families who rely on child care assistance to work.”

So on top of workers, pregnant women, veterans, the sick and the disabled, Republicans are adding impoverished children to the list of those who must sacrifice in order to reduce a deficit they didn’t cause. Of course, notably missing from the shared sacrifice list is the top one percent of wealthiest Americans who took home 25 percent of the nation’s income in 2009. The GOP offered them the Bush tax cuts instead — one year of which, as the Center For American Progress Action Fund’s Melissa Boteach notes, “is worth more than twice as much in deficit reduction as the cuts inflicted on programs assisting low-income families combined.”

As CBS News Scott Pelley notes, kids in poverty “tiptoe in a world of insecurity, hoping to be invisible.” Given the callous nature of their cuts, it seems House Republicans are compelling them to stay that way.

Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) has been using the guise of a budget crisis to propose kneecapping his state’s public sector unions by removing their collective bargaining rights. Though the changes to collective bargaining would not save the state much money (and Walker himself made Wisconsin’s budget picture worse by insisting on a slew of tax cuts upon entering office), Walker contends that his union-busting bill is necessary because his state is “broke.” “The facts are clear: Wisconsin is broke and it’s time to start paying our bills today — so our kids are not stuck with even bigger bills tomorrow,” he said in his budget speech last week.

Of course, Wisconsin’s public employees have already agreed to accept pay cuts and to place more of their compensation in Wisconsin’s public employees pension fund. And upon closer examination, Walker’s house-on-fire rhetoric regarding his state’s finances doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, as McClatchy found:

Ironically, in Wisconsin, where Republican Gov. Scott Walker is trying to weaken public-sector unions and reduce pension benefits, he’s exempted police and firefighters, who are among the most unionized public employees. And Wisconsin’s public-sector pension plan still has enough assets today to cover more than 18 years of benefits.

Keep in mind, that’s nearly two decades of benefits that could be paid even before the changes to which Wisconsin’s current public employees have agreed go into effect. Overall, Wisconsin’s pension system is 97 percent funded, according to the Center for Retirement Research.

In fact, as the Center for Economic and Policy Research pointed out, “the shortfalls facing most state and local pension funds have been seriously misrepresented in public debates”:

The major cause of these shortfalls has not been inadequate contributions by state governments, but rather the plunge in the stock market following the collapse of the housing bubble. Given the low PE ratios in the stock market, pension fund assumptions on the future rate of return on their assets are consistent with most projections of economic growth and past experience. Furthermore, when expressed relative to the size of their economies, most states are facing shortfalls that appear easily manageable.

Walker has already been scolded by his state’s finance director for falsely claiming that he would have to lay off state employees if his budget bill wasn’t passed by a certain date. Politifact also rated Walker’s repeated assertions that his state is broke as “false.”

Ultimately, as the Economic Policy Institute pointed out, ‘Wisconsin’s public‐sector workers have not caused the $1.8 billion shortfall the state faces for fiscal year 2012. Attacks on public‐sector workers would not only further compromise the tentative economic recovery in Wisconsin, but would place further strains on the programs, services, and public structures that the citizens of Wisconsin depend on to build strong and healthy families and communities.”

Gov. Terry Branstad (R-IA)

Wisconsin’s dispute over a union-busting bill seems to have reached an impasse, with the New York Times reporting that talks between Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI) and the state senate’s Democrats have broken down. Meanwhile, Ohio passed its union-busting bill out of the state senate last week, moving it to the Republican-dominated state house.

Another state considering a similar union-busting bill is Iowa, which tonight will hold a public hearing on legislation that would strip the state’s public employees of most of their collective bargaining rights. The bill includes a provision excluding public employees from bargaining over “outsourcing” or working to impose “any restriction” on factors the government may consider in a layoff. And Iowa’s Republicans, including Gov. Terry Branstad (R), are looking forward to their union-busting effort:

“We’re excited about that bill. It addresses a whole lot of different things,” said House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha. “We tried to be sensitive to all sides concerned.” [...]

Gov. Terry Branstad said he welcomes the proposed changes to what he called a “dinosaur” law that is creating employee costs that are unsustainable

Branstad claims that he has “no plans to seek an end to [public employees'] collective bargaining rights,” but this bill would do exactly that, as it not only removes key parts of employee compensation from the bargaining process but would allow “free agent” workers to craft their own side agreements with employers, in a more radical version of “right to work.” “[The bill] does gut collective bargaining, which we’ve had for 37 years in Iowa,” said state Rep. Pat Murphy (D).

Other Republican governors have pointed to their state’s deficit in a false attempt to justify their union-busting efforts. But Iowa can’t even do that. “”The state of Iowa is not broke. We are in the black. We will have a $252 million ending balance in June and we have $650 million in our reserve accounts in case the economy falters,” explained state senator Pat Jochum (D). Iowa’s pension system is currently 81.2 percent funded, putting it on much better footing than most of the pension systems in the country.

Iowa Republicans have already planned to cut back on their universal pre-school program in order to reduce corporate taxes. Passing their union-busting legislation would be just one more way in which they are taking advantage of national economic anxiety to push for changes that are purely ideological and anti-labor.