Tea Party Rep. Steve King (R-IA) took to the House floor yesterday to give a diatribe against large swaths of of the social safety net, from food stamps to heating fuel subsidies, but reserved particular disdain for unemployment insurance, which he dismissed as “welfare for people that won’t work.” Via Political Correction:

KING: The United States of America borrows money and hands it to people and tells them, you don’t have to work for this. You don’t have to produce anything for this. We just want you to spend it. [...]

The former speaker of the House, Speaker Pelosi, has consistently said that unemployment checks are one of those reliable and immediate forms of economy recovery. [...] The 80 million Americans that are of working age but are simply not in the workforce need to be put to work. We can’t have a nation of slackers and then have me have to sit in the Judiciary Committee listening to them argue that there’s work that Americans won’t do, so we have to import people to do the work that Americans won’t do, and borrow money to pay the welfare for people that won’t work. That is a foolish thing for a nation to do. We’ve gotta get this country back to work and get those people out of the slacker rolls and onto the employed rolls.

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King’s belief that people collecting unemployment checks are merely lazy is startingly common among conservatives, but it is as wrong as it is offensive to the million of Americans who are out of work by no choice of their own. In reality, there are 4.32 unemployed people for every job opening in the country, so even if every opening was filled, there would still be millions of people lacking employment.

Moreover, unemployment benefits are hardly generous, require beneficiaries to be actively searching for work, and run out after a certain period of time, so it’s unlikely someone would chose to remain unemployed. In fact, research by the San Francisco Federal Reserve has found that workers who qualify for unemployment benefits stay unemployed just 1.6 weeks longer than those who do not qualify for such benefits.

King calling unemployed Americans “slackers” is almost as bad as Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) compared the jobless to alcoholics and drug addicts.

President Obama’s recent jobs plan has reignited a fight over infrastructure investment, a priority for Democrats who see investing in improvement projects as a way to address both the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and high unemployment. Republicans have also claimed to support infrastructure improvement, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) saying it was important to bring the country’s roads and bridges “up to 21st century standards.”

Despite McConnell’s rhetoric, Republicans have steadfastly opposed actual attempts to bring America’s infrastructure to 21st century standards, since that would require actually spending money. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) blasted the GOP’s opposition to infrastructure investment under the guise of saving money today, saying if the U.S. didn’t invest in its crumbling roads, its failing bridges, and other areas of infrastructure development, the country is “destined to become a second-rate nation”:

RENDELL: Infrastructure is important in everything that we do. The World Economic Forum, which rated our infrastructure best in the world as early as 2005, has now placed us 15th. In air transport infrastructure, we’re 32nd behind countries like Panama and Malaysia. In port infrastructure, so important to our economy, we’re 18th. In rail infrastructure, we’re 22nd. That’s embarrassing. This country used the be the greatest country in the world, and I believe it still is. But we were the greatest country in the world because we met our challenges. We knew what we had to do. We didn’t worry about what it was going to cost, we worried about how it was going to benefit our people. [...]

Yes, you spend money to build the infrastructure, to make it safe, to improve the quality of our lives, to increase our economic competitiveness. Stop doing it, and America’s destined to become a second-rate power.

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Republicans got an example of exactly what Rendell is talking about this week, when the 50-year-old bridge Sherman Minton Bridge spanning the Ohio River between Louisville, Kentucky and New Albany, Indiana closed because of a crack in its structure. The closure is costing both private businesses and the government, as local economies suffer from lapses in productivity and the states divert funds from other programs to fix the bridge.

Putting off investments like one that could have prevented the Sherman Minton’s closure doesn’t save the country money. The longer Republicans continue to prevent the types of meaningful infrastructure investments the country needs, the more expensive it promises those projects will become, and the farther behind the rest of the world the U.S. will fall.

Take action and tell Congress it’s time to rebuild America.

As part of his critique of President Obama’s policies, Gov. Rick Perry (R) has been saying that the administration is not doing enough to “free up” Wall Street. During a campaign stop today, Perry said that one of the “first things we need to do” is repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, because new laws aren’t needed to rein in the “few bad actors” on Wall Street:

So freeing up the industry, whether you’re a bank or whether you’re a credit union, freeing them up from overregulation. I think overregulation of all of those industries is obviously a part of the problem. And repealing that Dodd-Frank act is one of the first things that we need to do…Do we need to have protections in place? Of course we do. But I would suggest to you that we have those protections in place today for the few bad actors that might be out there in the world. But the overregulation from Washington D.C., this one-size-fits-all, has to end.

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But Perry didn’t always feel this way. In fact, in 2008, with the financial system cratering, Perry criticized the banking industry, saying that it “has too often been run on greed“:

“My concern is that Washington is so inept at addressing these issues that are important to Americans, whether it’s securing our borders or whether it’s securing our financial future,” Perry said. “Washington has been absolutely abject failures at this.”

Perry stopped short of endorsing any particular approach to the U.S. financial meltdown and warned against any measures that would allow shady business practices to continue.

“We’re sick and tired of watching Washington bicker with each other while financial markets are roiled,” he said. “The other side of that is we’re certainly not interested in Washington bailing out a bunch of irresponsible mortgage brokers in an industry that has too often been run on greed.”

Despite this stated opposition to bailouts, shortly after the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) failed to pass the House on its initial vote, Perry sent a letter to Congress in his capacity as head of the Republican Governors Association that read “We strongly urge Congress to leave partisanship at the door and pass an economic recovery package. It is time for Washington, D.C. to step up, be responsible, an do what’s in the best interest of American taxpayers and our economy.”

Perry now denies that the letter expressed support of TARP, but its hard to read it otherwise. At a campaign stop today, Perry replied “no, maam,” to a woman who asked if he supported TARP.

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA), Rick Perry's translator

Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) has been taking a lot of well-deserved flak for deriding Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme.” But during Monday night’s GOP presidential primary debate, Perry doubled down on his position, saying, “this is a broken system. It has been called a Ponzi scheme by many people long before me.”

Even Perry’s supporters are clearly uncomfortable with this characterization. Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) endorsed Perry this week, but when asked repeatedly, refused to agree with Perry that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, what’s most important is the substantive point he was making,” Jindal claimed.

Yesterday, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA) — who succeeded Perry as head of the Republican Governors’ Association and has been floated as a potential Republican vice presidential candidate — told a local reporter that, when Perry says “Ponzi scheme,” what he is “actually trying to say” is that we should “preserve this valuable safety program for our senior citizens for our future generations”:

Q: What do you think about him calling Social Security a Ponzi scheme?

MCDONNELL: I think what he was trying to say and what all the Republicans were trying to say is to be honest with the people and say if you want to preserve this valuable safety program for our senior citizens for our future generations, we’ve go to reform it.

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Social Security is indeed a valuable program. Last year alone, it kept 14 million seniors out of poverty.

Earlier this week, Perry wrote an op-ed on Social Security without using his favorite terms for the program: “Ponzi scheme” and “monstrous lie.” And evidently, he needs to start bringing McDonnell to his campaign events in order to translate his words into something that the American public doesn’t find terrifying.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) was on the campaign trail in Newton, Iowa today, reviving his stump speech promise to make government “as inconsequential in your life as I can.” At one point, Perry bragged about the Texas tax system and its light burden on “job creators”:

We had a tax policy in place that allowed for our job creators to not be burdened, still delivering the services that the people desire in the state of Texas. So have a tax policy that is as light on the job creators as we can.

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As Matt Yglesias has noted, in reality Perry’s tax system “has done a great job of soaking the poor.” In fact, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, someone in the poorest 20 percent of Texans can expect to face a tax rate four times as high as a Texan in the richest 1 percent:

This isn’t really surprising, considering that Perry believes that the poor and seniors don’t pay enough in taxes. At the same time, Perry has admitted that higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires “isn’t going to affect anything” in terms of economic growth.

Louisiana has had its share of disasters during Gov. Bobby Jindal’s (R) time holding political office, from hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005 (when Jindal was a congressman) to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that threatened the state’s beaches and waterways in 2010. The federal government came to Louisiana’s aid in each case, spending billions of dollars in emergency disaster funds to help clean up and rebuild the state in the aftermath of the disasters. In none of those instances did Congress offset the emergency funds with spending cuts, and in none of those instances did Jindal go out of his way to ask them to.

But with states across the nation rebuilding in the aftermath of hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and tornadoes, Jindal wants to put restrictions on emergency funds that didn’t exist for the funds that benefited his own state. In an appearance on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown today, Jindal told host Chuck Todd that deficits and debt are a “man-made disaster,” and because of those, the disaster relief funds for New Jersey, Virginia, and other states in desperate need of relief “should be offset”:

TODD: There’s been a movement afoot to…search for budget offsets now, a change frankly. [...] Any advice for your fellow Republicans in the House when dealing with disaster relief?

JINDAL: We certainly as a state benefited after Katrina and Rita from the generosity of the American people. I fully support making sure the resources, the necessary resources, are there to help. [...] I do however, also support, at the same time, so they need, they deserve the help they need to get back on their feet. At the same time, I do think these dollars should be offset, should be part of a balanced approach to the budget. The reality is the deficit, the debt in DC is not caused by natural disasters, that’s a man-made disaster.

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While some Republicans fought to offset Hurricane Katrina funding, Jindal was not among them, and neither was then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX), who argued that the funds should be deficit financed. And in 2008, Jindal traveled to Washington to lobby Congress to preserve $400 million in funding for ongoing hurricane relief and recovery efforts that had been stripped because they weren’t offset by other cuts.

Louisiana Rep. Cedric Richmond (D), who represents New Orleans, recently told the New Orleans Times-Picayune he couldn’t imagine what would have happened had Republicans held disaster relief hostage for the millions driven out when Katrina put his city under water. “We would have been waiting for months or even years for the assistance we needed to get New Orleans up and running again,” Richmond said. Jindal, apparently, has forgotten that.