Texas' unemployment insurance fund appears headed for insolvency. So does New York's. More than a dozen states have little or no money for extra welfare benefits in case of recession, and the federal program designed to back them up expired over the weekend.
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The problems are most extreme in Texas, where officials acknowledged last week that the combination of an employer tax cut supported by then-Gov. George W. Bush last year and a recent jump in jobless benefit claims is draining the state's Unemployment Compensation Trust Fund.
[read more]

thanks to Ethel the Blog

Now we pay for years of reducing the safety net. "We need to get those bums off of welfare!" "They need to get off their lazy butts and get a job!" Tell that to all those airline workers suddenly out of a job. I wonder if all those middle class people who voted for Bush, that will be getting laid off, will see this in a different light when they have little or no benefits to fall back on and they get to fight for minimum wage jobs at McDonalds? They will discover that the Republicans are not looking out for them. The Republicans are just looking out for their bosses. Let's not forget those Democrats that have gone along with this.

Bush Meets With Congress on Economic Plan

President Bush's chief economic adviser said Tuesday there is a high probability the U.S. economy will have two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth -- the textbook definition of a recession.
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A senior Bush aide said the president wants three main components:

--Incentives to help businesses, such as accelerating depreciation and boosting expensing write-offs for equipment, eliminating the alternative minimum tax paid by some companies and possibly cutting corporate tax rates.

--Incentives to help individuals, such as providing a new round of tax rebates or hastening some of the tax cuts Bush pushed through Congress this year.

--Incentives to help displaced workers, such as extending unemployment benefits at least 13 weeks beyond the 26-week maximum, helping people pay for health insurance and more than doubling the roughly $200 million-a-year Labor Department emergency grant program
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I find the order of the proposals interesting. First we give more money to business. And cut their taxes. Then we cut taxes for individuals. Of course, if you don't have a job this might not be such a big deal. Then we increase unemployement benefits by 50% and add $200 million to the emergency grant program. This is after giving $15 billion to the airlines.

And on the Middle East front...

An Isolated Peres Blasts the Army

Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres lashed out at his nation's military Monday, accusing a senior officer of wanting to assassinate Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, as violence threatened to torpedo the cease-fire announced last week.
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The 78-year-old statesman, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Arafat as co-architect of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, said the deaths of nine Palestinians in the Gaza Strip the day the cease-fire was signed had endangered the agreement. He also complained that Maj. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, the army deputy chief of staff, wants Arafat assassinated.

"Let's say we assassinate him," Peres told interviewer Nahum Barnea, one of Israel's most respected political analysts. "What happens next? With all the criticism of Arafat, he is the Palestinian who recognizes the map on which Jordan and Israel exist. In his place will come Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah."
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Peres also expressed sympathy for the man many Israelis now consider public enemy No. 1. At their meeting last week, Arafat was "very serious--worried," Peres said. "He's afraid that we want to get rid of him. We're simplistic. Insensitive to his problems. We turn our back on the distress in the territories."

Peres also took issue with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's demand that Arafat halt all attacks before political negotiations resume, saying it is the equivalent of ordering Israel's transportation minister to stop all traffic accidents. He dismissed Sharon's characterization of Arafat as "Israel's Osama bin Laden," a reference to the Saudi militant whom U.S. officials consider the prime suspect in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
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In Monday's interview, Peres said Sharon must soon make the sort of decision that Israel's first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, made when he accepted the partition of Palestine into two states, one for Jews and one for Palestinians. To preserve Israel as a Jewish, democratic state, the foreign minister said, Sharon will have to give up the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza and draw the nation's borders at its pre-1967 boundary.
[read more]