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“It’s a hurry up and wait moment on Capitol Hill as congressional negotiators on a must-pass, almost $1 trillion COVID-19 economic relief package struggled through a handful of remaining snags Thursday… After being bogged down for much of the day, negotiators reported behind-the-scenes progress Thursday night.” AP News
Both sides criticize Congress for not passing a bill sooner:
“We’re writing about the same deal over and over again because Congress has fussed over the same details for spending their imaginary money for the last four months. As I wrote yesterday, it’s essentially the same deal that Congress could have easily passed any time over the last four months. The elements for this kind of compromise have been hiding in plain sight all along.”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
“Even if a bill passes, millions of workers will likely face a lag in receiving those payments while the regulators and states responsible for distributing them iron out the new process. An estimated 4 million workers have likely already had their benefits run out, some of them for months, after they maxed out the number of weekly payments to them established by the CARES Act, the first stimulus package. However long it takes to get a new system up and running is how long they’ll have to wait before they get another check… it could take two to eight weeks for checks to start going out… It turns out governance via extreme procrastination is not an ideal approach.”
Emily Stewart, Vox
Other opinions below.
“I am not a fan of deficit spending or of big government programs, but the case for spending large during a pandemic is not hard to make. This has been a horrible year, with many businesses shut down and millions of workers put out of their jobs through no fault of their own. Even as we approach the end of the pandemic, we are fighting a third wave of infections, and unemployment claims are on the rise again. We need to keep the economy afloat in an emergency, and that is precisely when you should borrow. It will be much less painful to pay this money back later than it would be to suffer COVID-19’s full wrath all at once…
“The new bill helps both out-of-work laborers and damaged businesses. The former will get an extra $300 a week in unemployment benefits, and those receiving long-term benefits won’t see them expire later this month, as could have happened for millions. Both these provisions will expire after ten weeks or so, by which point the vaccines, God willing, should have seriously mitigated the pandemic.”
Robert Verbruggen, National Review
“Counties that received [Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)] loans early saw smaller unemployment jumps in April and May. The differences among regions diminished over the summer as PPP expanded and disappeared altogether by the fall. We find that moving from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile of counties by early PPP penetration improved the insured unemployment rate in the spring by more than 12 percentage points, the equivalent of 18 million jobs when extrapolated nationally…
“Such numbers would imply the cost of each job saved was less than $30,000, indicating that PPP not only was highly effective at saving jobs, but also did so in an extremely cost-effective manner. PPP’s scale and speedy implementation were crucial to avoiding a slow, yearslong recovery like the one that followed the 2008-09 financial crisis. PPP is one of the main reasons why the unemployment rate peaked at only 14%, and why it took a mere six months to decline by more than half from its peak—a feat that took six years under the previous administration…
“As state and local governments have begun to restore restrictions on small businesses, the time is right for Congress to authorize a second round of PPP.”
Michael Faulkender and Stephen Miran, Wall Street Journal
“Democrats have blocked small business loans; unemployment subsidies; emergency rental and food assistance; funds for testing, tracing and vaccine distribution; and extended student loan forbearance — all to protect the ability of personal injury lawyers to cash in on the pandemic…
“Republicans in the Senate bipartisan working group agreed to support the state and local aid if Democrats would agree to protect Americans against frivolous lawsuits. But Democrats, except for Sen. Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), would not agree to even limited liability protection that would expire when the public health emergency was lifted — a time that will be determined by President-elect Joe Biden…
“The failure to include liability reform undermines the whole purpose of passing emergency economic relief. The billions spent keeping small businesses and nonprofits afloat will be for naught if they are ultimately shuttered trying to defend themselves from unfair lawsuits arising from a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. If that happens, it will be because the Democratic Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the trial lawyers’ bar.”
Marc A. Thiessen, Washington Post
Finally, “Though the Cares Act clearly called for the [Fed lending] programs to end on Dec. 31, Democrats insist that the Biden Treasury could revive the programs and renew lending. That’s why Mr. Toomey also wants the bill to include language that leaves no doubt that the programs end on Dec. 31…
“That Democrats are opposing the Toomey language gives away that their plan is to use the Fed to go around Congress if they don’t control the Senate next year. They’re afraid a GOP Senate won’t agree to another spending blowout to rescue profligate states like Illinois and New Jersey. They want to use the Fed’s municipal and state lending facility, which was stood up this year at the height of the pandemic and market disruption, as the bailout vehicle…
“Even if the $429 billion that was turned over to Treasury is earmarked for other Covid relief, the Fed still retains some $35 billion to $40 billion as a backstop for its special pandemic facilities. That could be leveraged as much as 10 times to lend to states and cities at terms the Biden Treasury and Fed would set. That’s all the more reason for Republicans to hold firm on Mr. Toomey’s language ending the programs.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“As evidence mounted that the temporary support provided by the CARES Act had run its course and the economy was weakening again, Congress dithered… The Fed did what it could to stabilize markets and support the economy by lowering interest rates and loaning trillions of dollars to teetering businesses, federal agencies and cash-strapped local governments…
“[But] That left out aid for workers and families, a lifeline that only Congress can extend… We should all be thankful for the talented scientific community that managed to develop a Covid-19 vaccine in record time, and a steely-eyed Fed at the ready to support a sagging economy. We should also be troubled by an absentee Congress that has left millions of workers, families and entrepreneurs in the lurch and may not be there to answer the next call.”
Timothy L. O'Brien and Nir Kaissar, Bloomberg
“Republicans appear willing to make a deal because they fear that complete stonewalling will hurt them in the Georgia Senate runoffs. But they are determined to keep the deal under a trillion dollars, hence the reported $900 billion price tag. That trillion-dollar cap, however, makes no sense. The amount we spend on emergency relief should be determined by how much aid is needed, not by the sense that $1 trillion is a scary number…
“Affordability isn’t a real issue right now. The U.S. government borrowed more than $3 trillion in the 2020 fiscal year; investors were happy to lend it that money, at remarkably low interest rates. In fact, the real interest rate on U.S. debt — the rate adjusted for inflation — has lately been consistently negative, which means that the additional debt won’t even create a major future burden…
“Even economists who worry about deficits normally agree that it’s appropriate to run big deficits in the face of national emergencies. If a pandemic that is still keeping around 10 million workers unemployed isn’t an emergency, I don’t know what is.”
Paul Krugman, New York Times
“Republican politicians’ opposition to state and local aid is puzzling. Their districts are in trouble, too. A recent Tax Policy Center analysis found that red states (Alaska, Wyoming, Florida, Louisiana, North Dakota, Texas) have had among the sharpest revenue declines, with revenue from April to September down more than 10 percent from the same period a year earlier. Yet somehow, Republican lawmakers dismiss federal help to their own constituencies as a ‘blue state bailout.’…
“Since February, state and local government have eliminated 1.3 million jobs — laying off teachers, first responders, utility workers, bus drivers, public hospital employees and others. For context, these governments have already axed nearly twice as many jobs so far this year as they did in the entire five-year period following the Great Recession. And the overwhelming lesson of that era was that public-sector bloodletting made the private sector recover much more slowly… Take the deal, Congress. Then immediately start working on the next one.”
Catherine Rampell, Washington Post
“We’ve seen horror stories like the Tyson meatpacking plant in Iowa where supervisors ‘took bets on how many workers would get infected with Covid-19, even as they took measures to protect themselves and denied knowledge of the spread of the illness at work.’ Despite such stories, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has proposed that workers and customers be forbidden from suing businesses for allowing them to contract covid-19 unless they can prove ‘gross negligence.’…
“That standard is so high that almost no one would be able to reach it; you’d practically have to prove that your employer gave you covid on purpose. This is necessary, McConnell and the Republicans say, because without it there will be a wave of frivolous lawsuits that will unjustly victimize businesses and hamstring the economy. But if they were right when they contend that without a liability shield then workers and customers will begin suing businesses willy-nilly, it already would have happened. After all, there’s no liability shield in place now. So where’s the wave of frivolous lawsuits?…
“According to a tracker maintained by the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth that monitors suits related to the pandemic, there have been 23 commercial personal injury complaints, 118 employment claims for things like failure to provide PPE, and 108 wrongful death claims. While I can’t vouch for how complete their data are, given that over 16 million Americans have contracted covid and 300,000 have died, if that’s the magnitude of the lawsuits we’re seeing, it’s almost nothing… [Republicans] want to ‘solve’ a problem that doesn’t exist and create more problems in the process.”
Paul Waldman, Washington Post
