For those of you who might remember the days of the Carter Administration when the U.S. embassy workers in Teheran were held under lock and key for a very long time–"Nightline" got its ratings boost, and made its name, from the nightly graphic trumpeting how many days America had been "held hostage". Well, we have a new hostage crisis: the American people are being held hostage by the richest one percent, courtesy of the Republican Party.

   Basically, the Republicans are saying: if you don’t give the richest one percent a huge cash dump, we aren’t going to let millions of unemployed people get a few scraps to get by. The tradeoff in policy terms: tax breaks for the very wealthy in exchange for extending unemployment benefits for many of the people who don’t have a job in part because of the incompetence and greed on the part of *some* of the very rich.

   Should we appease the elite? Krugman is right:

The answer is that they should just say no. If G.O.P. intransigence means that taxes rise at the end of this month, so be it.