Please go back to your real job, Paul Broun (R-GA)

I am getting really, really tired of hearing U.S. Congressmen and Senators excoriate other public employees. For some reason, Republicans don't seem to think that federal employees are citizens; they certainly don't care if their budget cuts and threats not to raise the debt ceiling deprive hundreds of thousands of citizens of their jobs. And now Paul Broun, Republican Congressman from Georgia, flippantly states on conservative radio host Martha Zoller's show that not raising the debt limit would only put 250,000 or so people out of work. And who cares about those people, anyway? They're just federal employees:

Well, [Paul Broun said] those are gonna be government employees that are put out of work. There are a lot of government employees that need to go find a real job. [Hear these words here:"Paul Broun Fine with 250,000 Public Employees Being Laid Off..."]

Just what is a real job, Congressman Broun? Is taking care of the payroll with the Department of Defense not a real job? Is running the veterans' hospital system not a real job? Is collecting federal income taxes not a real job? How about managing federal lands and national parks? How about the crews who do the cleaning up after tourists at national monuments, national parks, national museums? How about the folks who provide summer informational tours and activities for children at those national museums and national parks? How about those folks at NOAA who chart hurricane activity in the summer and fall? How about the people who make sure (to the best of their ability even when stymied by budget cuts and ideological demagoguery) we have clean air and water?

I admit, Paul Broun, I have a dog in this fight. My husband works for the federal government; he was fortunate to get this job, one which he not only enjoys but for which he is eminently qualified, during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. We have been married for thirty-three years, have seen hard times and good times, and are putting two kids through college. Well-educated, neither of us has ever received a paycheck that truly compensated us for our skills and education, but, also, neither of us has ever been motivated primarily by money. We've had jobs that enabled us to give back to society in some way, through education, conservation, or scientific research. And now we have reached the age when it becomes increasingly difficult to find appropriate employment if we lose our jobs. I know. I've been either under-employed or un-employed for the past several years, despite an excellent employment history (though being a woman who changed jobs to fit the needs of her family certainly did not help me in the long-term). There are hundreds of thousands--millions--of Americans like us, people who paid their taxes, took responsibilities for their families, contributed to their communities, and looked forward to, if not a comfortable retirement, at least a livable retirement.

Those hundreds of thousands of Americans include federal employees who have helped people like you steer the ship of state. And now, in a time of great distress, you are all for abandoning them and for taking an economic path that would not just put more Americans out of work when the current national unemployment rate is 9.1%, but that would also have additional serious consequences for millions of people around the world. Not raising the debt limit could--according to economists that include those from your own political party--cause another financial crisis, and we're not even out of the current crisis yet. Some are even predicting that the current crisis could escalate into another Great Depression. And you're just itching, evidently, to add fuel to the fire.

So please go back to your real job, Congressman Broun. As a federal employee.....you suck.

"ObamaCare: It Totally Works for Me"

One day this week, my daughter, a college student home for the summer, my son, a recent college graduate working part-time until starting graduate school in the fall, and I were talking about our current situations. All of us now depend upon my husband's full-time job, a job he has had for almost a year after 6 months of job-searching during the most serious economic slump since the 1930s.  We are middle-class, well-educated, tax-paying, engaged citizens. So it was with a great deal of anger over the past year that I listened to politicians as they criticized the unemployed:

'Ninety-weeks [of unemployment benefits] is too long' [complained Jim Lembke, Missouri Republican Senator]. 'People need to get off their backsides and get a job. Maybe they'll have to get two jobs or three jobs to make ends meet, but they need to quit stealing from their neighbors.' ("Four Republicans Hold Up Missouri Jobless Benefits")

I am sure that hundreds of thousands of jobless Americans approached their job search much as did my husband, with the same intelligence, dedication and care he has provided in every job he has ever had in his life. He got dressed every morning, sat at his desk for hours searching the job boards, e-mailed his updated resume and letters of application, made phone calls, attended the mandatory federal workshops for the unemployed even when they weren't particularly useful, and did part-time work for neighbors so as not to be idle. My part-time job and my husband's unemployment benefits helped pay for the groceries and the bills. And, like many Americans, we spent a lot of what we had hoped to have had available when we retired. But we also know that we are better off than thousands of Americans still looking for jobs. And these folks are facing employers who won't even interview people who are currently unemployed.
 

Throughout his undergraduate years, our son worked part-time on the campus of the large university he attended and to which he will return this fall as a graduate student. With that part-time job, he paid his bills and bought his groceries; we paid for tuition, books, and housing out of a fund my husband had set up years before. After my husband and I married before our junior year in college, we supported ourselves with part-time jobs and scholarships--with a little help from my husband's parents, who paid his tuition, and with an occasional handout from my parents. As graduate students, we completely supported ourselves with part-time research and teaching positions at the university we attended.  My husband received a scholarship to work on his Ph.D., while I taught full-time in the English department of the university at which my husband was studying. We finished our undergraduate and post-graduate education with no debt. Today's college students cannot expect such opportunities. At the four graduate schools to which our son applied (and to all of which he was accepted), our son was told that he could not expect a graduate research position as a master's degree student. One university sent him a letter to let him know he was eligible for a financial aid packet--a student loan that would add up to almost $100,000 at the completion of his master's degree program. Such debts are not unusual for college graduates these days. According to Mark Kantrowitz, the founder of FinAid.org and FastWeb.com,

As many as one-third of bachelor's degree recipients can expect to still be paying back their student loans when their own children head off to college. Katie Leslie, "College Graduates Saddled with Debt," The Atlanta Journal Constitution, 22 May 2011.

This summer, our son has moved in with us to save money. All of his apartment furniture is in our shed. He and his sister, also home for the summer, are sleeping on twin mattresses on the floor because the furniture for our guest room hasn't arrived yet (and our daughter's bedroom furniture is headed to an apartment in June). He got a part-time tutoring job at a tutoring center in a nearby town. And because of the Affordable Care Act, we've been able to keep him on our health insurance policy.

So it was with all this background in mind that my son said, "President Obama needs to embrace the label 'Obamacare' that opponents call the Affordable Care Act."

"Do you mean 'co-opt' the label?" I asked.

"Yes," he said. "He needs to turn it into a positive. And I should get a t-shirt with the slogan--ObamaCare: It Totally Works for Me."

My husband and I are in our early fifties. We have worked all our lives; until recently, I taught at universities and colleges in or near every town in which we've lived. In 1987, my father retired at the age of fifty-four, one year older than I am now. Retirement is a distant goal for my husband, and unemployment an every day experience for me. We still have adult children to support.

We are the middle-class upon which the economic health of this country depends.

ObamaCare: It Totally Works for Us.