The White House and their Republican enablers in Congress are refusing to extend the $600 a week unemployment benefit in the new stimulus package, claiming people are "refusing to work" because they never had it so good.
There is only one way to look at this insane push by White House's refusal to aid all workers: they are trying to force Americans to go out, possibly get infected, get very sick, and die -- because the Trump administration wants to kick-start the economy at the expense of human life to help his reelection chances.
It's criminal.
The constant theme that's being promoted by these cretins is that low-wage earners are making too much from the relief package to ever look for a job again.
On Sunday's ABC's This Week, The White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows shot down the idea of continuing a $600 a week unemployment benefit with this lame excuse.
“The original unemployment benefits actually paid people to stay home, and actually a lot of people got more money staying at home than they would going back to work,” Mr. Meadows said on Sunday. “So the president has been very clear, our Republican senators have been very clear, we’re not going to extend that provision.”
Texas Senator Ted Cruz attacked the idea of extending these benefits in roughly the same way.
“We've got to get American back to work," he said.
Sen. Cruz continued, "The policy the Democrats and Nancy Pelosi are pushing adds an additional $600 a week. The problem is, for 68% of people receiving it right now, they are being paid more on unemployment than they made in their job.”
The $600 a week payout calculates out to a $15 an hour job. Does Sen. Ted Cruz and the White House believe every worker filing for unemployment insurance makes $15 an hour?
And even if they did why does it matter?
Is infecting and killing them from the pandemic a better alternative?
Maybe stopping the spread of the virus will help the economy much more? Just a thought.
Sen. Cruz or Meadows didn't care when Steve Mnuchin refused to divulge who received some 500 billion dollars of PPP money.
The top corporations received monies from the first stimulus packages while small businesses suffered waiting and waiting to see if they were even accepted into the PPP program.
But Trump and his cronies while mentioning small business problems are opposed to continue to help them.
What about the billion dollars Lockheed Martin requested after making 3.5 billion in profits?
Even though their profits were up 15%? Where's Republican outrage?
As Major League Baseball attempts to restart a sixty-game season, already the Miami Marlins have been shut down due to an outbreak of the coronavirus.
Does that ring any bells for these conservative creeps?
Why is the White House not doing everything it can to help American workers?
UPDATE (Frances Langum): NPR is reporting that paying unemployment benefits by this White House formula could delay benefits up to THREE MONTHS.
Such a lag could mean that the roughly 30 million people currently collecting pandemic-related unemployment benefits would see their income drop from a weekly average of $900 to an average of $300 per week.
The proposal would cut emergency unemployment benefits to roughly 70% of a person's lost wages — a more complicated calculation than the current, flat $600.
Critics have warned since March that such a proposal would undermine efforts to speed relief to millions of people out of work due to the coronavirus. The potential delays are so significant that the U.S. Department of Labor told Congress in May that it "strongly" opposed such a change because states would find it "exceedingly difficult if not impossible to implement."
