Marco Rubio: Out Of Work? Tough Luck

 

Marco Rubio, the Florida GOP’s candidate for US Senate, loves to burnish his conservative chops. At least eight of his recently released “Marco’s 12 Simple Ways To Grow Our Economy” call for—big surprise—slashing taxes, like extending the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, cutting corporate taxes, ending the death tax, and so on. But what about helping out the unemployed? That’s not in Rubio’s 12 economic ideas, and on Monday, the candidate waved off the idea of extending emergency jobless benefits—a position he’s standing by even with a sky-high 11.4 percent jobless rate in Florida and when a vast majority of Americans support more jobless support.

In Tampa on Monday, Rubio said the only way Congress should approve more help to millions of unemployed Americans is if lawmakers make cuts to offsets the cost of more benefits, the Miami Herald reported. “At some point,” Rubio said, “someone has to draw a line in the sand and say we are serious about not growing debt.” 

The former Florida House speaker’s commitment to chipping away at the federal deficit is, to some extent, admirable. In the long term, the federal debt, if untamed, is a worrisome issue. But Floridians will elect a new US senator in November. So how smart of a political move is it for Rubio to dismiss our jobs crisis when more than 200,000 Floridians have already lost their benefits, and when 62 percent of Americans in a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll said Congress should extend benefits to the unemployed?

 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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