Like the warden calculating precisely how many calories a prisoner doing hard time needs to work, walk and sleep -
- Ron Johnson has been tapping away on his pocket calculator to find the lowest dollar amount - perhaps it's $200, but it sure ain't $600 - that will motivate lazy Americans to find jobs that don't exist:
Said Johnson:
In the middle of an insidious pandemic that has already killed 150,000 Americans with no end in sight.
Johnson's indifference is the very definition of perverse.
And what's really perverse is Johnson's coming up with yet another version of the boiler-plate GOP myth of the conniving, lazy, undeserving American and throwing it at citizens en masse out there without any data to back it up - during a debilitating, killer pandemic.
Worse, this sleazy stereotyping is routine partisan and political perversity by the Republican Party.
* Ronald Reagan had his welfare queens.
* Scott Walker fabricated in exchange for votes people he said would rather sit on the sofa playing video games than work as hard as he and fellow good small town lad Paul Ryan had done when they flipped burgers at separate Wisconsin McDonald's.
And, yes, Ryan had his own, 'lazy inner-city men' version of Walker's coach potatoes and Johnson's shiftless - and unnamed, of course - gig-workers whom Johnson believes prefer government checks to money they'd been earning.
The underpinning of these disrespectful and unproven Republican tall tales is that only they know know work and its meaning.
Which is why they believe they are entitled to calling the shots while steering the public sector which they and one-time rightwing guru Grover Norquist agree should be starved, throttled and drowned in a bathtub.
Which for public officials managing the public sector with its public health and safety obligations for The People is about as perverse as it gets.
- Ron Johnson has been tapping away on his pocket calculator to find the lowest dollar amount - perhaps it's $200, but it sure ain't $600 - that will motivate lazy Americans to find jobs that don't exist:
Ron Johnson spearheads GOP proposal to extend pandemic unemployment while reducing its amountNote the complete absence of humanity in Johnson's cold-accountants'/wonky-government-speak-calculus:
"The states have the option — if they can't handle the two-thirds plus-up, they can accept the $200 flat plus-up," [Johnson said....]And then he got in one last dig at millions of out-of-work Americans who hadn't yet found that new opportunity since Ivanka Trump sent them on her heartfelt Easter egg hunt.
Said Johnson:
On the Senate floor Thursday, he argued that the HEROES act was too expensive and that by continuing the $600 payment, "we are creating a very perverse incentive for people to remain unemployed when our economy is calling for more workers."I'll tell you what's perverse: a millionaire US Senator who collects about $15,000 a month in public salary and gobs of perks who is now nickel-and-diming millions of citizens who are out of work, out of income, out of health insurance and pretty much out of the middle and working classes for the foreseeable future in the worst economic collapse since The Great Depression.
In the middle of an insidious pandemic that has already killed 150,000 Americans with no end in sight.
Johnson's indifference is the very definition of perverse.
And what's really perverse is Johnson's coming up with yet another version of the boiler-plate GOP myth of the conniving, lazy, undeserving American and throwing it at citizens en masse out there without any data to back it up - during a debilitating, killer pandemic.
Worse, this sleazy stereotyping is routine partisan and political perversity by the Republican Party.
* Ronald Reagan had his welfare queens.
* Scott Walker fabricated in exchange for votes people he said would rather sit on the sofa playing video games than work as hard as he and fellow good small town lad Paul Ryan had done when they flipped burgers at separate Wisconsin McDonald's.
And, yes, Ryan had his own, 'lazy inner-city men' version of Walker's coach potatoes and Johnson's shiftless - and unnamed, of course - gig-workers whom Johnson believes prefer government checks to money they'd been earning.
The underpinning of these disrespectful and unproven Republican tall tales is that only they know know work and its meaning.
Which is why they believe they are entitled to calling the shots while steering the public sector which they and one-time rightwing guru Grover Norquist agree should be starved, throttled and drowned in a bathtub.
Which for public officials managing the public sector with its public health and safety obligations for The People is about as perverse as it gets.