The week began with a debate over extending unemployment benefits and it ended with a report from the Treasury on executive bonuses at banks that took TARP bailout money.
I’m pretty sure there was no plan to link these two events, but they do provide interesting bookends to the week.
On Monday, we were talking about how best to help people who are in economic distress and we ended up on Friday talking about people who are experiencing no economic distress, because the taxpayers rushed to their assistance.
One executive received a $10 million bonus even as his firm was receiving an emergency transfusion of taxpayer funds.
Hearing the report on the bonuses, my thoughts turned to the new word I learned this month, “99er.” 99ers are people who have exhausted all their unemployment benefits. All 99 weeks of it. True, they are better off than those who got no benefits. Still, 99 weeks.
The 99ers I spoke with are bright, passionate, and many had been employed for very long periods of time. In a normal time, the economy would snap these people up.
But this isn’t a normal time. Some people facing economic failure were rescued by taxpayers and rewarded with huge bonuses. Others, far more vulnerable financially, were left to their own devices when their time is up. How do you explain that?
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