Congress in perspective: The stimulus check – The liberal
The upcoming stimulus package is too little too late. A study from the University of Dayton found that there were 50 million Americans facing food insecurity at the end of 2020, up from 35 million the year before. One in six children is at risk of going hungry. The $300 weekly federal unemployment benefits are set to run out in March.
No American who has been seriously financially impacted by the pandemic cares about or wants to hear partisan bickering. Nearly half of Congress has a net worth of over $1 million. It would be incredible to see any one of them live off of what they are giving the American people in COVID-19 relief.
The fastest way to grow the economy is to give people money to spend. However, the current relief package is not enough. People need continuous payments until the pandemic is over. We need those payments to include college students, many of whom face economic insecurity, uncertain futures and a lack of opportunity due to current COVID-19 restrictions.
We also need to be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the 2008 Recovery Act. The $840 billion legislation was undoubtedly expensive, but it still resulted in many losing their homes, and jobs growth was slow. Obama went too small.
Two sources of the biggest holdups in the stimulus package are Sens. Kristen Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV), as they are concerned about enacting a $15 minimum wage. A congressional budget office study found that increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour would increase pay for 17 million workers and pull 900,000 Americans out of poverty while getting rid of 1.4 million jobs. A way to combat the loss of jobs would be to fund small businesses properly and end the bureaucratic nightmare many small business owners face in applying for loans and aid. Instead of having a war within the Democratic Party involving Rep. Ocasio-Cortez attacking Joe Biden for not agreeing to forgive $50,000 in student loan debt, we need to increase the size of the stimulus check in order to level the playing field for those who have already paid back loans. Maybe swing senators (who have signed on to the $1.9 trillion amount) would be more willing to adopt a policy that is actually popular in their respective home states. What a concept!
Those who are struggling do not care about personal politics. They don’t care how liberal Joe Biden is and they don’t care to hear Kamala Harris on their local news station lecturing about sound policy. A large section of those who have fallen victim to the financial hardships caused by the pandemic are people of color, independents and Trump voters. Both parties realize that current economic desperation has been fueled by the declining number of jobs paired with the higher cost of living, massive student loan debt crisis and massive healthcare crisis. These problems got Trump elected, and they must be solved if we do not want a plethora of people like Marjorie Taylor Green filling the halls of Congress in 2022 or Trump himself making a comeback in 2024. If that means kowtowing to reasonable conservatives and Joe Manchin, so be it.
