Panhandlers In Tampa Bay…

 

…are most certainly a dime a dozen in this area. Everywhere that one walks or drives will run into panhandlers at almost every major intersection in this town. You cannot get away from these people!

    I bring this topic up because a few days ago the Tampa City Council decided that it was just fine and dandy for this group to come up to drivers in order to get cash from them. Now, they cannot ask the drivers for the cash so they stand in the intersections middle island while holding up signs that read “will work for food” or “hungry,thanks for the help” with the usual “God bless you” at the bottom.

    This would usually not bother me,but the local clowns here in government are using the excuse that the economy is bad and that many folks here in the area have some cash to spare. I’m fine with that also as those of us who can should be trying to help others less fortunate.

    Many of these panhandlers are out in the intersections on Sunday selling newspapers for a little extra change in their pockets. I have no problem with that either as I’ve done that a few times myself. The extra $30 to $70 comes in handy on weeks when the bills are coming due.

    It is the other 6 days of the week that I have a problem with especially since most of those out doing this are panhandling for their beer and/or crack habits, not for food or rent money. Many of the same just happen to be getting checks from the government for either S.S.I. or S.S.D. from Social Security. I know of more than one who get their checks on the 3rd of the month and who are flat broke by the 6th or 7th of the month because they have smoked their checks up in crack and have drank the money up. Then they go out and harass the drivers for cash to help them support their habits. This is bullshit.

    Tampa Bay Online

"There are enough distractions on the roads," said Frank Ehnle of Brandon. "Having to deal with panhandlers or vendors standing in the middle of intersection or at off ramps is yet another ridiculous distraction that impairs driving and affects traffic."

Staff photo by KATY KUEHNER

City officials have blamed St. Petersburg's solicitation ban, as well as the impact of the economic recession, for the recent increase in panhandling on the city's roadways.

     More Here

Dozens of newspaper "hawkers" packed council chambers, urging the council not to ban median solicitation, saying such a move would put hundreds of people out of work.

"You don't realize how many people you'll be putting on the unemployment line," said Sonia Long, a hawker for both The Tampa Tribune and St. Petersburg Times.

    Bullshit! they only do this one day a week. That does very little for those folks trying to actually buy food or pay a bill.

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Did The Stimulus Create Any Employment?

   Well, of course it did but you would not know it when listening to the Republicans talking. the GOP had made it plain after Barack Obama and the Democrats took over that they would do anything possible to make sure that Obama got nothing done while in the White House, and they have kept their word. So now,with the mid-terms only a few short weeks away the Democrats are looking at some pretty good losses in both the House and the Senate because no one paid attention to the “dead” Republican party which would not see a return to any sort of power in the near future. The Democratic party has been sleeping at the wheel and so have the American people. This is what the Republicans can count on year after year.

    Here are the Republicans at work spreading their falsehoods.

FastCheck

The economic stimulus package is a favorite target of Republican candidates and groups, but more than a few ads falsely claim it did not create or save any jobs. Some recent examples:

• Republican House candidate Dan Debicella charges that Democratic Rep. Jim Himes failed Connecticut’s families because he voted for a "stimulus package that has done nothing to reduce unemployment."
• Rick Scott, the Republican candidate for governor in Florida, says Democrat Alex Sink "backed the failed stimulus bill, which created debt, not jobs."
• Similarly, Sink — who never served in Congress and didn’t vote on the bill — is attacked by the Republican Party of Florida in an ad that says the stimulus "gave us big debt and no jobs."
• Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group that does not have to disclose its donors, aired an ad against Democratic congressional candidate Denny Heck of Washington that claimed the "$787 billion stimulus … failed to save and create jobs." The group has launched similar ads against other Democrats.
• Kristi Noem, a Republican House candidate from South Dakota, calls the measure a "jobless stimulus."

The truth is that the stimulus increased employment by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million people, compared with what employment would have been otherwise. That’s according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

 

Analysis

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, more commonly known as the stimulus bill, has been featured in more than 130 TV ads this year, according to a database maintained by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. In many of those ads, Republicans claim the bill has "failed" (a matter of opinion) or state (correctly) that unemployment has gone up since President Barack Obama signed the bill into law on Feb. 17, 2009. The national unemployment rate was 8.2 percent in February 2009, and it now stands at 9.6 percent, having peaked at 10.1 percent in October 2009.

But it’s just false to say that the stimulus created "no jobs" or "failed to save and create jobs" or "has done nothing to reduce unemployment" – or similar claims that the stimulus did not produce any jobs.

As we have written before, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office released a report in August that said the stimulus bill has "[l]owered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points" and "[i]ncreased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million."

Simply put, more people would be unemployed if not for the stimulus bill. The exact number of jobs created and saved is difficult to estimate, but nonpartisan economists say there’s no doubt that the number is positive.

 

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