When the US Congress passed an Epidemic Assistance Bill on Monday, Meghan Mayor, a single mother from Lincoln, Nebraska, thought she daily struggles to feed and keep her two children at home during an unprecedented health and economic crisis. Will get some relief from.
But the next day President Donald Trump announced the long-awaited relief package “an outrage” and said he would not sign it into law, slashing some of its spending measures, demanding that it be passed on to most Americans Large incentive checks are included.
By the weekend, he had refused to move.
He leaves Mayer, who has been on unpaid medical leave from his customer service job at retailer TJ Maxx since May, as he faces severe COVIDs while facing financial losses. He is one of about 14 million Americans whose emergency unemployment benefits, introduced by Congress when the epidemic took hold in March, ended on Saturday.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” the 39-year-old mayor told Reuters in a phone interview. To make it through 2020, Meyer said she needs friends and donations to help keep food at the table, pay her rent, cover the family dog’s medical expenses, and buy Christmas gifts for her children. Has to bend over.
“I’ve said and held out,” he said.
The new relief bill will expand through mid-March programs that support self-employed workers and those unemployed for more than half the year. It pays an additional $ 300 a week through mid-March to receive all those unemployed benefits, some 20.3 million people. And it expands through a stay on eviction due to expire on 31 January and provides $ 25 billion in emergency rental assistance.
Many economists agree that aid is insufficient and that more will be needed after Democratic President-Elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20. Biden called the bill a “downpayment”.
Negotiated by Trump’s own Treasury Secretary, Steven Menuchin, and Republican Congressmen, the bill was blown up at the president’s Florida beach resort where he is staying for vacation, awaiting his possible signature. In a tweet on Saturday, Trump indicated that he was still not ready to sign the bill, despite lawmakers showing goodwill at Christmas time.
“I just want our greats to get an average of $ 600 instead of $ 2000,” he tweeted on Saturday, referring to the bill’s incentive check, while continuing to rail about the November election as he touted electoral fraud. Made baseless claims in
Trump did not criticize the terms of the aid package before the House of Representatives and the Senate for the vote.
The economy boomed as epidemic locks broke out in March, with Congress receiving emergency unemployment benefits as part of the $ 2 trillion CARE Act. At the time, lawmen did not envisage that assistance would be needed beyond Christmas and until last weekend, they could not arrive at a deal to expand the profits.
Meyer, like others, has seen his benefits decrease in the last six months following the CARES program, which gave him $ 600 a week in supplementary unemployed payments that ended in July, and he ended his allowance for the Pandemic Emergency Assessment Compensation Have done.
He left her with an extended profit of just $ 154 a week until Saturday, which would increase to $ 454 when he signed and signed Trump’s bill. If he does not, the mayor will get nothing.
“The difference is whether we have enough groceries or not, can I pay my car insurance or can I have the gas to go to the food bank,” she said.
Meyer said he voted for Trump in 2016, but was quickly turned down by his behavior in office, and described his opposition to the relief package as “petty”.
‘Squash’ on growth
US job growth has slowed after an initial rebound, when orders to stay home were lifted in the summer, and a new wave of coronovirus infections now threatens to dent recovery.
Andrew Stattner, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank The Century Foundation, said that delaying relief would slow recovery even as most Americans get vaccinated and life returns to normal in 2021.
“If you don’t have this money going around in the economy, it’s going to squeeze things in,” Stetterer said.
He said that like the mayor, most people who are no longer eligible for federal unemployment benefits will have no income, as most states provide scant assistance.
Nearly 9 million Americans, who would not normally qualify for unemployment insurance, including self-employed and gig workers, were receiving epidemic unemployment assistance (PUA), until Saturday ended with other car programs.
The 54-year-old artist from Ann Arbor, Michigan is Margie Rawson, who will run a booth at art festivals around the country in a typical year. Those festivals may not return until June, but from Saturday, Rawson will suffer a loss of about $ 150 a week in the PUA that he has relied on throughout the epidemic.
“As if this world is not already filled with anxiety, now we have it at the top,” Rawson said.
Reported by: https://www.blackenterprise.com/u-s-jobless-benefit-cut-off-pushes-millions-to-financial-cliff-edge/
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