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Wednesday, March 25, 2020

The bill is, perhaps, even worse than not great

They gave Mnuchin the power to unilaterally override the already meager restrictions on what happens to the corporate bailout money.
Final text of the bill has not been released, but according to a legislative draft, the new law would establish a $4.5 trillion corporate bailout fund overseen by Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, with few substantive constraints. The bill permits bailed out companies to lay off up to 10% of their workforce over the next six months, with no restrictions thereafter. Mnuchin would have authority to waive any upside for the public in its new investments, and the bill’s restrictions on stock buybacks at bailed-out firms are too temporary to be significant. Bailed out companies could even pay dividends to their shareholders.
Meanwhile the people suffering the most from the "service-led recession," the service industry, cash only, or paycheck to paycheck workers being laid off with little prospect for work in the forseeable future, could have to wait as long as 4 months to receive their relief payment.

Meanwhile anyone filing for unemployment under the terms of the new bill should know Republican Senators are ashamed of you.
A handful of Republican senators on Wednesday threatened to delay the $2 trillion coronavirus spending bill over a proposed increase to unemployment insurance.

In a statement, Sens. Tim Scott, R-S.C., Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said that the bill could provide a "strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work" because some people could theoretically make more by being unemployed.
To begin with, this is not true. BUT, for the health and safety of the entire country,  it definitely should be true! No one is going to be safe from the virus until the spread is isolated or a vaccine is developed.  And because a vaccine is likely still over a year away, we have to stop the spread.  Since the only way to stop the spread is to keep as many people as possible from going to work then we'd better do everything we can to make sure they do not feel overly "incentivized" to do that.  Paying people to stay at home should be the top priority right now.  But the psychotic President wants to send everyone back to work by Easter so... well here we are.

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