WASHINGTON -- The Department of Transportation furloughed nearly 2,000 employees without pay Monday as the government began to feel the impact of Republican Sen. Jim Bunning's one-man blockage of legislation that would keep a host of federal programs operating.
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Federal projects shut down include more than $38 million in project funding for Idaho's Nez Perce National Forest and Fernan Lakes Idaho Panhandle National Forest and $86 million for bridge replacements in the Washington, D.C., area. Bunning's home state of Kentucky has no projects affected by his action.
However, nearly 1.2 million unemployed workers, including 14,000 in Kentucky, would lose federal jobless benefits this month if Congress doesn't extend them, according to the National Employment Law Project, a liberal-leaning research group. The U.S. Labor Department estimates that about one-third will lose benefits in the first two weeks of the month.
Letting the highway program lapse could mean an estimated 90,000 jobs lost. As many as 2 million families could lose access to local television because a copyright law expired overnight.
States hardest hit by the Monday cutoff, according to the law project, would be California, where an estimated 201,274 people could lose help, and Florida, where the total is an estimated 105,016. Other potential state totals: Georgia, 48,284; Texas, 82,850 and Illinois, 65,431.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/01/1507212/who-really-gets-hurt-from-hold.htmlBunning defended his action Monday on the Senate floor:
"If we can't find $10 billion to pay for it, then we're not going to pay for anything. The debt that we have arrived at, even the head of the Federal Reserve Bank, chairman (Ben) Bernanke, said it's unsustainable."
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Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 Summary: $1.3 trillion in unfunded tax cuts.
"The sunset provision sidesteps the Byrd Rule, a Senate rule that amends the Congressional Budget Act to allow Senators to block a piece of legislation if it purports to significantly increase the federal deficit beyond a ten-year term. The sunset allowed the bill to stay within the letter of the PAYGO law while removing nearly $700 billion from amounts that would have triggered PAYGO sequestration"
Roll call: Bunning (R-KY),
Yea LinkJobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003Summary: "The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the tax cuts would increase budget deficits by $60 billion in 2003 and by $340 billion by 2008."
Roll call: Bunning (R-KY),
Yea LinkMedicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization ActSummary: "Initially, the net cost of the program was projected at $400 billion for the ten-year period between 2004 and 2013. One month after passage, the administration estimated that the net cost of the program over the period between 2006 (the first year the program started paying benefits) and 2015 would be $534 billion"
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"Bruce Bartlett, a Treasury Department economist during the Reagan administration, recalled in a recent Forbes magazine article that the Bush administration knew the figure was too low because Medicaid's actuary had concluded, long before the bill was passed, that the ten-year cost of the program would more likely be $534 billion. The actuary, Richard Foster, later revealed that Republican appointee Tom Scully, Foster's superior at the Department of Health and Human Services, warned him he would be fired if he disclosed the higher estimate. "
Roll call: Bunning (R-KY),
Yea LinkIraq War ResolutionSummary: The White House, which predicted in 2002 that the war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion. In 2006, the CBO estimated that it would cost $500 billion.
Roll call: Bunning (R-KY),
Yea Link----
No wonder why Bunning opposes unemployment benefits. Every time he says 'Yea' another hundred billion falls out of the Treasury's coffers!
