Sophie's Choice is probably one of the greatest tragedies in the history of motion pictures.
Which of her two children will Sophie sacrifice to save the other?
But if you repeat this scene over and over and over, it turns into a farce.
(cf. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon: "All world historic facts appear twice, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.")
So the Democrats have somehow contrived to make this gruesome situation even more farcical than Marx probably imagined, because instead of actually choosing one child to sacrifice...
They cut off one child's nose and another child's ears and yet another child's fingers in the hope of piling up enough body-parts to satisfy the Wall-Street gods who rule our world.
Remember "Welfare Reform" aka The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996?
Bill Clinton signed that thing!
It didn't abolish AFDC, but at a certain time as determined by the Congressional Republicans, we cut families off the dole and more or less forget them.
You may or may not have already noticed a similar pattern in the Age of Obama, but now we're about to arrive at a cut that's big enough and definite enough to wake up almost anybody who hasn't been paying attention.
This time we're cutting off 1,300,000 Americans, and hundreds of thousands of others who depend on them.
Extended unemployment compensation comes to an end for 1,300,000 American families December 28, 2013, and even the business press can smell the stink of this deal.
According to the U.S. Department of Labor, extending federal benefits through 2014 would cost about $25 billion. The actual economic impact of cutting them off would be larger. That’s because the unemployed reliably spend that money, creating a multiplier effect in the economy. Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics (MCO), estimates that every dollar of unemployment benefits generates about $1.55 in economic activity. By that measure, ending the payments would cost about $39 billion in spending next year.
But what the heck! The Democrats didn't give away
the whole package of unemployment compensation!
They only cut off its legs!