Unemployment benefits are not the problem
This weekend, CPTV Spirit showed “Twelve Angry Men,” the 1957 courtroom classic with a strong cast that includes Henry Fonda and Hartford’s own Ed Begley.
Begley, the son of Irish immigrants, grew up in the capital city, which he said was a town too small to hold him. He told reporters later that he tried to run away from home many times — with the circus, with traveling fairs, with any group whose plans included boarding a train and leaving town.
He said he finally escaped at the unimaginably young age of 11. After knocking around, Begley launched a long and storied Hollywood career as a character actor, including a stint in “12 Angry Men” as Juror 10, the toxic, bigoted man who delivers a hateful speech about “these people” and grows increasingly agitated when other jurors leave the table to look out the window, to stare at the floor, to do anything but be a party to what he is saying.
Listen to me, Juror 10 pleads as he sees he’s losing his audience. Listen to me.
It is a turning point in the film, and the graceful dance of decent men walking away from bigotry and ignorance is beautiful to watch.
Perhaps we’ll witness something similar now, in real, live burgs and villages around Connecticut where problematic candidates (Listen to me, listen to me) are dropping out or considering leaving the race because politics are hard, and campaigning strictly on the platform of anti-science (the “unmask our kids” horde) or anti-history (the “I don’t know what CRT is, but I’m against it” crowd) simply isn’t enough.
The state is at a precipice, and we need leaders who can put down the misspelled signs and govern. Gone is our theatrical summer, when adults who drive cars and raise children threw public fits over the impermeable rules of a virus. Now it is time to put away childish things and prepare for what may be a long, cold winter.
Federal pandemic stimulus aid has ended or is ending for Connecticut residents, including help that goes by the name of (but not limited to) the Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation, the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment
Compensation, and the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance. The country’s eviction moratorium is over, after the totally not-political conservatives on the Supreme Court said that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which had imposed the moratorium, did not have the authority to do so. The court said that “it strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority it asserts.” Only Congress could authorize such a ban, said conservatives steeped in the ideology that we should all be pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.
The liberal wing dissented. Activists reminded everyone that the burden of remaining in homes during a melted economy falls particularly hard on communities of color, especially women within those communities. And homeownership is a foundation for building generational wealth. Connecticut’s moratorium could end this week, with Gov. Lamont’s emergency powers.
Every disaster is a learning opportunity, but if the planners and policymakers expect everything to magically snap back to the before times, well, the way it was didn’t work terribly well for all of us, did it? When the bottom dropped out of the economy last year, heaviest hit were families of color. Connecticut employers (and the state’s own Department of Labor) have said there are jobs out there for the taking, and that may be true, but if the wages those jobs pay don’t equal or better than unemployment benefits, might we be doing something wrong? If government benefits pay more than what you can make slinging hash, is that really such a difficult equation to understand?
Meanwhile, the work of Juror 10 has been codified into an unfair system. We want this pandemic to be over, but it isn’t, and when all the props are removed, the economic freefall could end with a sickening thud. It won’t be the financially elite who land hard. It will be everyone else, including inappropriate political candidates who have been benefiting from help extended by a government they decry.
That isn’t quite how I want to end this column. I want to end this column on a hopeful note, after months of disappointing COVID numbers and atrocious candidates floated by a political party that ought to know better.
So:
Earlier this month, the U.S. Census Bureau released a report that said that by taking into account federal anti-poverty measures, the 2020 poverty rate dropped to 9.1 percent, down from 11.8 percent, the year before. This is the 10th year the government has used this device, the supplemental poverty measure, to assess household wealth.
How did this happen in an economy ravaged by a global pandemic? The biggest salvation was Social Security and — wait for it — stimulus payments, which, according to the bureau, moved 11.7 million people out of poverty. Expanded unemployment benefits further prevented 5.5 million people from falling into poverty, the bureau said.
Government programs can work to do precisely what they’re supposed to do, push people a rung up on the ladder so that they have a shot at climbing the rest of the way themselves. Should you hear someone launch into their own version of a Juror 10 soliloquy, be sure to remind them of that.
Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “Tempest-Tossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.