Tag: Trump botched COVID-19 response tanked the U.S. economy

McConnell Says Providing More Relief To Working Families Isn’t ‘Appropriate’

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday it was “appropriate” that his proposed coronavirus relief legislation would not include stimulus checks for millions of Americans.

When asked by reporters if his bill would include stimulus checks, McConnell said, “no it doesn’t” and justified the omission, noting, “We thought about $500 billion was appropriate at this juncture.”

McConnell’s so-called “skinny” proposal does not include aid for ailing state governments, extended unemployment benefits, or individual stimulus checks. But it does include liability protection for corporations. Continue reading.

McConnell Moves to Head Off Stimulus Deal as Pelosi Reports Progress

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The top Senate Republican told colleagues that he had advised the White House against striking a pre-election deal with Democrats to deliver pandemic aid, fearing political repercussions.

WASHINGTON — Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, privately told Republican senators on Tuesday that he had warned the White House not to strike a pre-election deal with Speaker Nancy Pelosi on a new round of stimulus, moving to head off an agreement that President Trump has demanded but most in his party oppose.

Mr. McConnell’s remarks, confirmed by four Republicans familiar with them, threw cold water on Mr. Trump’s increasingly urgent push to enact a new round of pandemic aid before Election Day. They came just as Ms. Pelosi offered an upbeat assessment of her negotiations with Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, telling Democrats that their latest conversation had yielded “common ground as we move closer to an agreement.”

The cost of their emerging compromise on a new round of aid to hard-pressed Americans and businesses has steadily climbed toward $2 trillion, inching closer to Ms. Pelosi’s demands even as it far exceeds what most Senate Republicans have said they can accept. Continue reading.

PPP plan falls short in Senate as hope for COVID-19 aid wanes

Standalone measure to reauthorize another round of forgivable business loans was rejected by Democrats as ‘political stunt’

Amid ongoing COVID-19 economic aid negotiations and the approaching election, the Senate effectively shot down on Tuesday a standalone proposal to authorize a second round of forgivable loans to small businesses.

Republicans were unified in their effort to push forward the measure in a test vote. While Democrats support the Paycheck Protection Program, they voted to “table” the measure Tuesday, because it wasn’t included as part of a larger economic proposal. The vote didn’t directly kill the measure, but it displayed the proposal didn’t have the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

The proposal would have given the Small Business Administration $258 billion for a second round of forgivable loans to coronavirus-affilicted small businesses through the PPP. Continue reading.

Jobless Workers Built Up Some Savings. Then the $600 Checks Stopped.

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Anonymized bank data shows what happened next, as balances shrank and hopes dimmed for action from Washington.

The $600 weekly unemployment benefit the federal government funded this year was a remarkably effective expansion of the safety net. It helped pay many workers more than their lost wages. It enabled families to spend more than during normal times. It even allowed households to put away savings as the economy was teetering.

Then the money stopped at the end of July. And it’s clear, looking back, what happened next: Workers quickly burned through the reserves that the aid had given them. Of the savings many households were able to build up over the course of four months of unusually generous government help, much of it was gone by the end of August.

That picture, using banking data from about 80,000 households receiving unemployment and analyzed by researchers at the JPMorgan Chase Institute and the University of Chicago, shows that unemployed workers steadily built up their checking account balances this summer. The median account had more than twice as much money in it at the end of July as at the start of the year. When the benefits expired, those balances swiftly dropped, wiping out most of the accumulated gains. Continue reading.

Trump’s den of dissent: Inside the White House task force as coronavirus surges

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As summer faded into autumn and the novel coronavirus continued to ravage the nation unabated, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist whose commentary on Fox News led President Trump to recruit him to the White House, consolidated his power over the government’s pandemic response.

Atlas shot down attempts to expand testing. He openly feuded with other doctors on the coronavirus task force and succeeded in largely sidelining them. He advanced fringe theories, such as that social distancing and mask-wearing were meaningless and would not have changed the course of the virus in several hard-hit areas. And he advocated allowing infections to spread naturally among most of the population while protecting the most vulnerable and those in nursing homes until the United States reaches herd immunity, which experts say would cause excess deaths, according to three current and former senior administration officials.

Atlas also cultivated Trump’s affection with his public assertions that the pandemic is nearly over, despite death and infection counts showing otherwise, and his willingness to tell the public that a vaccine could be developed before the Nov. 3 election, despite clear indications of a slower timetable. Continue reading.

Expiring benefits raise economic stakes of stalled stimulus talks

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Washington’s inability to pass a much-needed stimulus bill ahead of November’s election is expected to inflict further damage on the economy, potentially kneecapping its recovery as the expiration of key benefits looms.

Haggling between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has progressed, with Mnuchin saying he is willing to sign on to a $1.8 trillion deal, but the sides say they remain far apart on key issues.

President Trump has zigzagged from calling off talks because Democrats refused to lower their price tag to insisting that he was willing to shell out even more than what Pelosi had on the table. Continue reading.

Kudlow Hails Mass Unemployment As ‘Gales Of Creative Destruction’

Larry Kudlow, Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, celebrated the tens of millions of job losses fueled by Trump’s failure to contain the coronavirus, calling mass unemployment a “great part of American capitalism.”

Kudlow made the comments in an interview with Fox Business host Stuart Varney on Friday morning.

“I saw something else today, one of the smart Wall Street people are talking about it. And it’s an odd thing because the talk is that a lot of folks who became unemployed, all right, most regrettably but they’re sticking with it and starting new businesses. They’re going to be small businesses. But that’s the great part of American capitalism, gales of creative destruction. I just love that new business start-up story,” Kudlow said.

Kudlow did not name the “smart Wall Street” person who made this point to him, but that person appears to have their facts wrong. Continue reading.

U.S. budget deficit breached $3.1 trillion in 2020 as pandemic slammed economy

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New White House data show how a huge surge in spending to confront the economic fallout fueled a historic increase in debt.

The U.S. budget deficit eclipsed $3.1 trillion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to government data released Friday, by far the biggest one-year gap in U.S. history.

The data are a stark reflection of the staggering blow that the coronavirus pandemic has dealt to the U.S. economy.

The deficit — the gap between government spending and tax revenue — shows the dramatic surge in spending the U.S. government approved to contain the pandemic’s fallout earlier this year. Continue reading.

8 million forced into poverty since McConnell let relief expire: studies

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The authors of two separate poverty studies out of three top universities said Thursday that their findings make the unmistakable case for more federal economic aid for families struggling to make ends meet during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Seven months after Congress passed the CARES Act, which included expanded unemployment benefits and one-time direct payments of $1,200 for many adults and $500 per child, the package’s positive impact on poverty levels have already been reversed, according to a study by researchers at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy and one out of the University of Chicago and Notre Dame.

While the number of people living in poverty fell by about four million after the CARES Act was passed, the Columbia study found that eight million more Americans are now poor than were in May—signaling that the pandemic has plunged more people into poverty than before the crisis. Continue reading.

Trump faces unusual barrier to COVID-19 aid: GOP allies

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President Trump‘s last-ditch effort to secure another enormous package of emergency coronavirus relief is being threatened by an unusual group: his GOP allies in Congress.

For almost four years, Republican leaders have rallied behind the president on issues as varied as health care, immigration, trade and defense, even when his positions bucked long-held conservative doctrines.

Yet just weeks before the Nov. 3 election, as the embattled president is exhorting Congress to move a major package of COVID-19 aid, those same lawmakers have emerged as the single greatest barrier standing in his way. Continue reading.