Here's some opinions from the New York Times. It gives some more information about what's in the Rescue Bill we are waiting for.
Sorry, no link, though there are some links within the article to more info. The article seems pretty centrist to me.
One thing it mentions, is the the call for a $15 minimum wage is old and if it had kept up it would actually be asking for $24.
--Kim
 | | Senator Mitt Romney, left, and Senator Joe Manchin.Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Erin Schaff and Calla Kessler/The New York Times, T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times and Getty Images |
|
One of the very first things President Biden did upon taking office on Jan. 20 was unveil a $1.9 trillion plan to help Americans to the other side of the pandemic. "More than 20 million Americans have contracted Covid-19, and at least 370,000 have died," the White House said in announcing the proposal, and "too many Americans are barely scraping by, or not scraping by at all." |
But a little over a month and 135,000 deaths later, relief for those Americans is still nowhere in sight. |
- $1,400 payments for people who made less than $75,000 in 2019 or 2020, with an additional $1,400 per child.
- A $400 increase to weekly unemployment benefits through September, down from the $600 supplement in the CARES Act but up from the $300 supplement passed in December.
- A phased increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from $7.25 by 2026; tipped workers who are now entitled to a minimum wage of $2.13 an hour would eventually get the standard minimum wage as well.
- An increase in the child tax credit to $3,600 per child, up from $2,000. The benefit would begin to phase out for individuals who make more than $75,000 a year and couples who make more than $150,000.
- $400 billion to combat the pandemic directly, including money to speed up the vaccine rollout and to safely reopen most schools within 100 days.
- $350 billion to help state and local governments bridge budget shortfalls.
|
From the start, Senate Republicans have balked at the price tag on Biden's bill, which, while significantly less than the House proposal's from last spring, is still about double that of the stimulus package Congress passed during the Great Recession. |
"I would be surprised if there was support in the Republican caucus if the bill comes out at $1.9 trillion, even if we're able to make some beneficial changes," Senator Susan Collins of Maine said this week. |
Even some economists in the center and on the center-left have expressed concern about the bill's size. In theory, the point of government stimulus during a recession is to fill the gap between the economy's potential output and what it's actually producing. According to Larry Summers, who was a chief economic adviser to President Barack Obama, the 2009 stimulus covered only about half of the output gap, which explains why many economists now think it was insufficient. Biden's bill, on the other hand, may be three times the size of the current output gap, Summers says, raising the possibility of runaway inflation. |
But other economists, including the chair of the Federal Reserve, say inflation fears are overblown. For one thing, as my colleague Paul Krugman explains, there's no way to precisely measure an output gap, and there's good reason to believe the current estimates are wrong. Moreover, Biden's bill is less like a traditional stimulus than a disaster relief package meant to address specific needs. And as Summers himself notes, even if inflation does increase, the government has tools to rein it back in. |
Some Senate lawmakers are eager to bar "upper-income taxpayers" from receiving the $1,400 payments. In the view of Joe Manchin, a Democrat who co-wrote an amendment with Collins to that end, this would mean phasing out the checks at annual incomes of $50,000 for individuals and $100,000 for couples. |
Many economists are sympathetic to this idea. In a recent study, the economists John Friedman, Raj Chetty and Michael Stepner estimated that households earning more than $78,000 will spend only about 7.5 percent of the $1,400 checks. By cutting off payments for couples earning more than $78,000 and individuals earning more than $50,000, they say, Congress could save up to $200 billion. |
But the economist Claudia Sahm, an expert on recessions, argues that everyone who got a check last time should get one again. She notes that the rules already bar upper-income households by excluding the top 10 percent and partly excluding the next 10 percent. And crucially, because eligibility is based on tax returns, the government doesn't have the real-time information it would need to single out the Americans struggling most, many of whom either aren't eligible for unemployment benefits or have trouble navigating the administrative obstacles to access them. |
A few things have changed since I wrote last week about the proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026, which is deeply unpopular with Republicans and even some Democrats. As a compromise, the Republican senators Mitt Romney and Tom Cotton made their own proposal to tie a $10 minimum wage by 2025 to penalties for employers who hire undocumented immigrants. |
But some Democrats say $15 an hour is already a compromise, since it was proposed many years ago. The Times editorial board, for example, endorsed it in 2013, and it's been part of the Democratic Party platform since 2016. If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity since 1968, it would now be $24 an hour, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. |
 | | Twitter |
|
Enter Josh Hawley, another Republican senator, who unveiled a third proposal this week: Any citizen making less than $16.50 an hour would receive half the difference, up to 40 hours worth of work per week, through a quarterly tax credit. Some say Hawley's proposal is smart to shift the economic burden of higher wages from employers to the general tax base, while others have criticized it for the same reason. |
 | | Twitter |
|
As The Times editorial board notes, the United States gives less aid to parents than any other developed nation besides Turkey. In part as a result, more than 10 million American children live in poverty. Biden's plan aims to cut that number in half by simply giving parents more money, up to $300 a month per child. |
Biden's proposal has the right idea, the board says, but it could be improved by borrowing from another plan introduced by Mitt Romney. Romney's policy would be permanent, rather than a one-year fix, and wouldn't require people to file taxes to secure their monthly benefit, a step that shuts out one in five people eligible for the similarly structured earned-income tax credit. |
But the idea of a child allowance faces steep opposition from other Senate Republicans. "That is not tax relief for working parents; it is welfare assistance," Marco Rubio and Mike Lee said. "An essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work." |
Angela Rachidi, a poverty researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, agrees that payments not conditioned on working would "reduce labor force participation among poor mothers" — and, one assumes, some poor fathers — "and deprive them on a path toward upward mobility." |
But my colleague Ezra Klein counters that even if a child allowance did allow parents to spend less time at their waged jobs — estimates put the effect at less than one reduced hour per week per parent — parenting is in itself a kind of work that demands to be honored. |
"Forcing parents into low-wage, often exploitative, jobs by threatening them and their children with poverty may be counted as a success by some policymakers, but it's a sign of a society that doesn't value the most essential forms of labor," he writes. |
Should we put the filibuster out of its misery? Ezra Klein and Jessica Anderson debate the question on "The Argument" podcast, moderated by the show's new host, Jane Coaston. Listen to the episode here and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. |
Do the states need saving? |
The pandemic was expected to batter local budgets, but many states, particularly those with progressive income taxes, have done better than expected, which in turn has generated more resistance to the bill's $350 billion state and local funding allotment. |
Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former senior Obama administration official, agrees with lawmakers like Romney who say some of that funding could be better spent elsewhere or more precisely tailored. "It should either be better defined by focusing on what it should be spent on, like infrastructure or broadband; what it should not be spent on (like tax cuts); or the total should be reduced," he told The Washington Post. |
A group of centrist lawmakers are planning to lobby Senator Charles Schumer, the majority leader, to do exactly that. At the same time, the White House maintains that Biden's plan reflects the needs of states and cities, which still face a revenue shortfall of about $300 billion through 2022, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. |
Biden's bill is expected to pass on party lines in the House by Friday. But it faces higher hurdles in the more evenly divided Senate, where lawmakers are waiting for the parliamentarian to weigh in on whether some of the bill's provisions, most notably the $15 minimum wage, can be passed with only 51 votes through the budget reconciliation process. |
In any case, Senate Democrats will have to move fast if Biden is to deliver on his "American Rescue Plan": The expanded unemployment benefits passed in December expire on March 14. |
Do you have a point of view we missed? Email us at debatable@nytimes.com. Please note your name, age and location in your response, which may be included in the next newsletter. |
💌Did a friend send you this? Get your own newsletter by signing up here. |
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment