Should people who lost no income or show a loss during Covid get "relief" money?

Well if it is for stimulation of the economy then give to EVERYONE and get the MOST stimulation. And know I don't agree to stipulate that any number of people don't give a crap about first responders, can only spending by first responders stimulate the economy if that is the purpose of the money? And you don't show respect to someone by giving them free money.

That being said Biden spoke on the matter today

"President Joe Biden laid out his case Friday for moving fast to pass $1.9 trillion in coronavirus relief,......

...“A lot of folks are losing hope,” Biden said in a speech at the White House. “I believe the American people are looking right now to their government for help, to do our job, to not let them down. So I’m going to act. I’m going to act fast. I’d like to be doing it with the support of Republicans ... they’re just not willing to go as far as I think we have to go.”

Sounds like relief to me

That being said my city ".......City Council approved $3 per hour in hazard pay for first responders for a four-week period, as well as a $250 one-time payment for all public safety personnel." In the spring. What has your city done?

 

Time for people to take the available jobs and get us back to a Trump economy where ALL wages were rising and especially at the bottom.

 

not raising the min wage will destroy jobs and services and bankrupt the country

Please think outside your own personal perspective.

 

Trump road the Obama wave and crashed it

now Biden has to clean up after Trump like Obama had to do after Bush

 

No one has cut spending except to the restaurant/hotel employees. The 4th 2020 income was higher than the 1st Quarter and higher than the last quarter or 2019 in fact the only two higher were the 2nd and third quarters of 2020.

BEA
https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=19&step=2#reqid=19&step=2&isuri=1&1921=survey



And







I don't mean to sound callus but I don't see the need for this great government money give away.

 

it took biden over FIVE YEARS to get the 10% unemployment he and Obama hit down to where Trump did it starting 50% higher in NINE MONTHS. Bush and the Republican congress handed the Democrats a 4.5% unemployment rate rising incomes and a paltry $161B deficit. The Obama/Biden administration said the stimulus would hold unemployment to just 8% and then rapidly fall. Instead it soared to 10% and stayed over that 8% for the next three and as I said FIVE YEARS to get it where it is now. Why should we go back to those failed policies?

 

I had no idea that consumer spending has recovered overall. However, there are certain industries that have been hit hard, and maybe we can give some money to them. Also, it recovered because of that trillions in spending. We still have at least half a year to go, so we can't cut if off now.

 

How does raising the cost of labor by government fiat without raising the output of that labor create more jobs, what economic theory makes that case and when has it worked?

Here's what the studies, the science shows, you know those consensus the left always loves.

The Dark Side of the Minimum Wage
It hurts the very people it’s supposed to be helping.

"The problem is that Americans don’t fully understand how the minimum wage works, or the many ways it hurts the very people it’s supposed to help. As the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) notes in a new review of the relevant academic studies, the economic consensus on minimum-wage laws is much clearer, and much more clearly negative, than the press often makes it out to be: The data show that increasing the minimum wage results in a significant net increase in unemployment. The increase is particularly pronounced among young adults — and most pronounced of all among low-skilled workers.

After an exhaustive review of studies on state-level minimum-wage increases enacted since the early 1990s, the authors conclude that “there are far more negative than positive studies, and that there is a very large number of negative and [statistically] significant estimates.” In particular, nearly 80 percent of the studies show negative employment impacts, and more than 55 percent show negative impacts with higher than 90 percent statistical confidence. On the other side, only 20 percent of studies show any positive impact, and barely 5 percent show positive impact with greater than 90 percent statistical confidence...

....the CBO study comes to a much different conclusion: “The $15 option would reduce real incomes by $9 billion overall,” with an $8 billion increase in incomes for those below the poverty line more than offset by a $16 billion loss of income for those above the poverty line.

...“No person in America can make it on $8, or $10, or $12 an hour,” says Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s point itself is debatable: $12 an hour means $24,000 a year for a full-time employee, well above the poverty line even for a household of four with a single income, not to mention two. But even if he’s right, the unfairness of earning $12 an hour for even a brief period cannot justify cutting people off — against their will — from the opportunity to learn and earn more by the fruit of their own labor."
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/the-dark-side-of-the-minimum-wage/

So remind me again what is so great about doubling the minimum wage to $15/hr?

 

the min wage has fallen way behind inflation, it should have been raised little by little - that is why we are where we are now

 

Open them up to business and in the middle and lower incomes 75% was saved or invested. If Biden doesn't blow this we could be on track to be below 5.5% by the end of the year. And the LESS the government does the BETTER. He made that non-sensicle statement that if we don't spend all this money like he plans it will take until 2025 to get back to full employment. That's only a drop of 0.8% FROM WHERE WE ARE NOW. My state is at 3.9% there are 22 states at or below 5.5%. Biden was put in charge of the 2009 recovery using these same type policies and it was a TOTAL FAILURE.

 

States are in charge of the covid restrictions and they are already starting to open up. Another factor is people's behavior which the government can't completely control. Its going to take a while for things to start returning to normal, and that is just a fact of reality. Our great unemployment numbers are propped up by trillions of dollars of borrowing, and we can't remove the props now.

 

Looking for government handouts... the downfall of a free society, turning over liberty for a little security provided by the elite masters. I just want the mf's to get their hand out of my pocket and leave me alone.

 

And the Biden Covid task force and CDC issue the guidelines and recommendations. Out great unemployment numbers are a result of the economy that was backing it and businesses struggling to stay open. It is NOT because of huge hand outs from government and paying people more to not work than to work. Businesses are BEGGING to get people to come in an apply. Unemployment is heading to go under 6% why are we sending out free money?

 

Trump road the wave of the Republican congress not Obama policies, he was the one who said we could never get to those employment numbers or that manufacturing base. He threw his hands up in the air with his "Hey don't blame me". Biden only has to get out of the way as that Trump economy is taking off again having gone through the COVID pandemic.

Biden was in charge of the recovery after the 2008/2009 recession which began a YEAR after the Democrats took back the Congress and majority power in the government. And their policies, which he wants to revert back to, were disasters by their OWN measures. It took Biden over 50 months to get the unemployment down from their peak 10% to where we are now. It took Trump 9 months to get it from over 14% down to the 6.3% we have now. And if a 6.3% unemployment rate requires regular checks of $2000 being sent to people why didn't Biden send them out all during those 50+ months when he couldn't get it below that?

 

Well, it looks like the topic has become moot. Apparently, no one is getting a check I wonder if the Left's supporters will call Biden out for the lies?

 

I'll admit that our lax covid measures did help the economy. But you simply can't ignore the trillions of stimulus passed by Trump and the trillions injected into the economy by the FED. Another consideration is that workforce participation is way down. Over 10 million fewer people are working today than last year. Many people just gave up and so aren't technically unemployed.

 

I voted for option #2. I get your point about and agree with the first part highlighted. However, it’s not the government’s money. It’s the taxpayers. They waste so much of it (as demonstrated with some of the pork in the current package) that we should allow the citizens who aren’t wealthy to choose how their tax dollars are spent to stimulate the economy.

 

In principle, no. However at the time of the first stimulus (March 2020) when nobody in the US had any idea how bad COVID was going to be, it made sense to just pass a ton of fiscal and monetary stimulus and then potentially claw it back later. And by all accounts those measures worked. There was immediate credit creation due to the Fed policies compared to the 2009 stimulus, and the checks + enhanced UI brought the poverty rate down for several months, which is just incredible. Even now, banks' monthly forecasts on things like delinquencies and writeoffs on credit card debt keep being wrong because those metrics keep going lower, which is astounding given how bad the economy still is and since we are technically still in a recession.

I'm against more checks at this point, though, especially to people who have not lost income. First of all these are stimulus payments, e.g. the primary purpose is to get people to spend money into the economy, but people are not going to build their budgets around these sporadic, one-time payments and most of it will go into savings account, debt repayments, or into financial assets. Elevated unemployment checks are much better at addressing the problems that people who lost income are having right now.

 

We do so through our representatives in Congress, we are a Republic. Were we a Democracy and the citizens of the entire country voted on the proposition of sending everyone $50,000 how do you think the vote would go?

And the point being if it is to stimulate the economy, which these things never do, then give it to EVERY citizen and STIMULATE.
If it is for relief then give it only to those who need relief not people who have been working and earning their normal wages throughout this.

We are at 6.3% unemployment and falling. That is what Biden has been handed. That's 0.8% away from what is considered full employment. The question is will he get out of the way and let the private sector get the economy going again or will he play government economic king thinking HE will get the economy going again by making it more expensive for business to operate.

 

The is was proven false the first to me you posted it.

The housing and financial collapse was the worst recession in 80 years, and affected the entire globe. Republican incompetence took YEARS to correct and get the economy going again. Revenues tanked and spending angst to be increased to
avoid a depression worse than after 1929. But, Obama was able to do it. Every single economic metric remained on the same unchanging upward trend from 2010 until the pandemic hit. Trump had no effect on the economy, other than EXPLODING the deficit and debt for no reason what so ever, during a booming economy.

 

As noted in the WSJ last Friday Lawrence Summer a leading Democrat economist who has served many Democrat administrations and Phil Gramm the noted Republican economist and former Representative and Senator each wrote separate editorials the former in the Washington Post the latter in the WSJ


Wrong Stimulus, Wrong Time
Biden wants twice the spending of 2009, though the economy is far stronger now.

Mr. Gramm made the case in our pages this week, and Mr. Summers in the Washington Post on Friday. Their economic vantage points are different, but they both suggest that the Biden bill’s focus on spending so much at the current moment to boost consumer demand is misplaced. The economic data increasingly backs them up......

...Manufacturing employment declined by 10,000 in January amid shortages of components and workers. Some have hauled in office workers to run their assembly lines. Notably, the average work week for all private and manufacturing employees increased by 0.3 hours as businesses utilized their workers more.

....Personal savings soared as high as 33.7% in April following the Cares Act and were still a healthy 13.7% in December before Congress passed another $900 billion in Covid aid. This means that, unlike during the 2009 recession, households aren’t weighed down by debt.

Personal bankruptcies, home foreclosures and loan delinquencies last fall were the lowest since at least 2003. The mortgage delinquency rate was 0.7% in the third quarter of 2020 compared to 7% in the first quarter of 2009. Home-buying and prices are surging thanks to record low interest rates, and people can take equity out of their homes to spend if they need it.

Wages are increasing across most industries as employers compete for workers. By December aggregate employee compensation had exceeded levels in February. It took 34 months for the economy after the 2008-2009 recession to hit this milestone. Millions of leisure and hospitality jobs should return once lockdowns ease and vaccines roll out.

According to a recent House Budget Committee estimate, $1 trillion from last year’s bills hasn’t been spent—including $59 billion for schools, $239 billion for health care and $452 billion in small business loans. State and local governments added 67,000 jobs in January. They don’t need more federal cash.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/wrong-stimulus-wrong-time-11612568558

It went on to note that there is still $1 trillion from last year’s bills sitting there waiting to get spent include

$59 billion for schools
$239 billion for health care
$452 billion in small business loans.

And that State and local governments added 67,000 jobs in January. Commenting correctly they don't need the extra cash.

We saw what happened when then VP Biden was put in charge of the Obama recovery using the same policies he is advocating now, a total disaster which in fact delayed the recovery taking of 50 months to to the unemployment level today and he only started with 10% we were at 14% 9 months ago. We saw the wages and salaries flatlined and the LFPR went off the cliff. Both of those were turned around by Trump with supply side policies NOT sending out free money.

 

I would imagine if we individually voted for what $ we would like to receive, in order to stimulate the economy, most of us would be in favor of something north of ten grand. But $50k sounds nice also.

It’s called a stimulus package, not a relief one. Although both can work hand in hand with each other to achieve the objective - revive the economy. I can concede that those who are working may not need the money. I’m retired and I would not be hurting if I didn’t get a check. Still, even some of those who are making above the $50k level are living from paycheck to paycheck and could use the help. The extra money for most would go to buy those goods they ordinarily wouldn’t or couldn’t afford to purchase. Again stimulating the economy.

Your last paragraph I completely agree with. He could make things worse. Especially when you factor in the jobs lost through his EOs. Good paying jobs with the potential replacement being simply wishful thinking at this point.

 

No it's called a relief package according to Biden and the Dems but both terms are being thrown about.

"Democratic leaders introduced a budget resolution, the first step toward passing a coronavirus relief package without GOP support.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/01/cor...th-republican-senators-about-relief-bill.html

And if for economic stimulus then it should be going to EVERYONE. There are ALWAYS people who live paycheck to paycheck even in great economies. The fact remains that we are nearly full employment again and employers are BEGGING for jobs, want to expand but cannot get people to apply. I related early here or in another thread a VP of the company I retired from last summer was in town last week and he invited me to dinner. I asked how things were going and he said they busy and had over 20 job openings they could not fill, good paying jobs with great benefits. It's industrial supply and he said almost all the manufactures, my former customers, are BEGGING for people to apply for work including a candy company in GA he had been at the previous week and they told him they were desperate to start a third shift to keep up with orders but could not get people to apply.

Handing out free money keeps people from going back to work. And the money in the previous stimulus was not spent on consumer goods it was mostly saved and invested.

 

It is pointless to try and have a discussion with you as you will merely claim you have already refuted anything posted, as you demonstrate regularly, and refuse to answer direct questions to you. Your history of obfuscation well documented.

And of course your claims of white flags, no white flag offered. So don't fallaciously claim one as that seems to be your only goal on this board.

 

white flag noted and accepted. everyone reading, including you, knows why you can't address the facts and data I and other have provided.