Needless to say, this is not how you "go big"

Every single thing is on fire.  We have to choose, right now, whether we are going to fight the fire on behalf of every single person or if we are going to allow predators move about and swallow up the vulnerable during the chaos.  Mitch McConnell is a predator.

The 247-page McConnell CARES Act puts the leader’s imprint on opening talks with Democrats in Congress as lawmakers prepare to work through the weekend to fast-track perhaps the most urgent legislative undertaking since the 2008 financial crisis.

The negotiations are certain to encounter difficulties ahead, despite the pressure on Washington to act. Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and economic adviser Larry Kudlow will meet behind closed doors with Senate leaders. Democrats say the Republican plan does not go far enough and some Senate Republicans object to certain provisions.

“We are beginning to review Senator McConnell’s proposal and on first reading, it is not at all pro-worker and instead puts corporations way ahead of workers,” said a joint statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer.

"McConnell CARES" They keep trying to tell us irony is dead but it's still very much our leading cultural product.  Just look at this shit.

Under the plan, the government would provide households an early tax rebate worth up to $1,200 for an individual or $2,400 for a married couple, with an extra $500 for each of their children. (So far, so good). The payments will be based on a household’s 2018 tax return, or if it didn’t submit one, their 2019 filing.

But the checks will shrink for both low and high earners. Americans with little to no tax liability (aka, poor folks) will only receive a minimum payment of $600, unless they earned less than $2,500, in which case they get zilch. Low-wage workers who don’t have a federal tax return for 2018 or 2019—adults generally aren’t required to file one they if earn less than the standard deduction—also won’t qualify for the early rebate. (They could still get it next year if they file taxes for 2020, but by that time it will be a bit late.) Meanwhile, the payments phase down for workers who make more than $75,000 and drop to zero for those making $99,000 and above (double those numbers for joint filers).

This is absolutely brutal. Friday, the state of Louisiana announced it received 47,000 new unemployment claims this week. A one time $1200 check helps absolutely none of these people. The nascent depression is said to be a "service-led" event. It is hitting waiters, cooks, bartenders hotel workers, performers, and so-called "gig economy" and informal cash economy workers first. The great majority of these workers are not eligible for severance or sick leave so they do not benefit from the emergency leave measures prioritized in congress earlier in the week.  Likely most of these people will fall within the "little to no tax liability" category which means they get even less direct aid than the targeted "middle class" recipients. In the midst of a crisis that is falling hardest on the poorest Americans, this is a bill that further punishes the poor.

Who will protect them?  We'd love to sit here and tell you the Democrats can do this. We know they've been advised by Rep. Maxine Waters as to how they should proceed.   The Waters memo (it's a policy memo and not yet incorporated into a bill) proposes substantial direct aid to individuals ($2,000 per month) with bailouts for state and local governments, Americans with student debt and the homeless.  McConnell wants to give poor and working class Americans almost nothing while handing multi-billion dollar bailouts to airlines and oil companies.

But so far the Democrats haven't moved on Waters' proposals. Instead they've been doing everything they can to help pull the process in McConnell's direction. In fact, the first voice raised in favor of limiting and "means testing" cash payments to workers wasn't McConnell's. It was Nancy Pelosi's.

In technical economic jargon, Pelosi wants to "means test" cash aid in response to coronavirus: Don't give the checks to everyone, but target them to the poorest people, by at least scaling up the checks for people further down the income ladder, or most likely phasing them out completely for Americans above a certain income threshold. Pelosi's deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, fleshed this point out further in a tweet: "The Speaker believes we should look at refundable tax credits, expanded [unemployment insurance] and direct payments — but MUST be targeted."

Means testing may seem reasonable. But it's actually not a great idea even in the best of times. And in a crisis situation like the social and economic lockdown necessitated by the coronavirus, direct and universal cash aid is one of the best single policy responses available. The fact that Pelosi had the chance to lead this charge a week ago and demurred, insisting on means testing as a condition, is blinkered and insane, on both the politics and the policy merits.

There are obvious positions the Democrats can take to claim the moral high ground. The Waters memo outlines some of it.  I think also everyone should listen to this interview with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and economist Stephanie Kelton this week about the scope of what's happening and what the scale of the response should be. Here is AOC answering a question about whether the Democratic response has been sufficient.

MH: No, I was gonna say, Congresswoman, do you sign on to all of that? And also a follow up. Katie Porter, your fellow freshman Democrat from California came out in the Atlantic yesterday and said she disagrees with Speaker Pelosi is focused on “refundable tax credits” over direct cash payments. She says that’s too slow. Do you agree with Katie Porter? Is the Pelosi/Schumer way just too slow given how fast the economy is going downwards right now?

AOC: Yes, I completely agree. I sit with Katie Porter on the Financial Services Committee and she’s absolutely right. And I agree with Professor Kelton. I think one thing that’s important to underscore when Professor Kelton is talking about well, we want to look, last time we only have one bite at this apple, there won’t be appetite. We have to examine why there wasn’t political appetite to do more in 2008. And the reason for that was because there was a package that was entirely designed to favor corporations, to bail out Wall Street that was more concerned with stock prices than wages and the health of Wall Street than the actual healthcare system. And that’s why there wasn’t political appetite to do more because we passed out billions of dollars and then the CEOs came in flying in on their private jets, asking for more. And so that was the core of why Americans rejected doing more after the first package.

Now is a very different time. If we focus our package on immediate bailouts for everyday people, making sure that we’re issuing things like mortgage and rent and student loan debt moratoriums, making sure that we’re getting cash into people’s hands, ensuring the fact that if they have to go to the hospital, coronavirus related or not because as we know this can trigger a series of other health issues, that you will be financially okay. And that is the number one thing that we need to do right now. We need to be introducing stabilizers to working families. And Katie Porter is absolutely right on the point of tax credits. You know, I think sometimes with all due respect to my colleagues, we get into this, you know, there’s a lot of like this 90s wonkery going on where if we do a backdoor tax credit, oh, that’s a clever way of helping people. But it doesn’t address the core issue, which is that people are experiencing a shock right now. We need to get checks into people’s hands. If you’re concerned about it being means-based, tax it on the other end. Get everyone a check right now. And then if you want to make sure that the millionaire’s don’t get 1,000 bucks, do an extra, you know, tax them on the other end of that and make sure that they can’t wriggle out of that.

People are in trouble. Just give people money.  "How do we pay for it?" STFU! Here is Rep. Rashida Tlaib's plan to mint trillion dollar coins to pay for it.  We can shoot the money cannon at people to help them out right now. This is what needs to happen.

To see why, one need look no further than New Orleans' City Hall where Friday afternoon Mayor Cantrell appeared once again to lecture New Orleanians on their failure to adequately observe social distancing directives.  Unfortunately, the mayor's message, no matter how loud she makes it, continues to be mixed.

In a fiery press conference Friday, Mayor LaToya Cantrell issued her strongest demands to date that residents stay home and shut down non-essential businesses to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus in the city, where cases have grown to more than 300 since March 9.

Cantrell doubled-down on restrictions the city put in place earlier this week with a "stay at home mandate." But despite her forceful rhetoric, the mandate does not include any significant new restrictions on businesses or residents and aligns with what other communities are doing around the country.

Coronavirus is dangerous. Every day we learn more about how dangerous it can be, even to those who may not have considered themselves part of the "at risk" population.  But, really, there is only one population of humanity. If any part of it is "at risk" then we all are. That's the whole point behind the "flatten the curve" idea in the first place.  Everyone has to have everyone else's back. Which is why, in order to ensure that workers stay home to protect the vulnerable, we have to assure them they will be taken care of too.

But Cantrell, and the tourism business owners who advise her, know only how to use a crisis to intimidate their employees into submission.  As long as people are afraid they have no choice but to go to work they are going to leave the house and go to work. If you give people no support, if you give them no money, if you give them no reason to expect that they will have a job when the crisis ends unless they keep putting themselves at risk, if, in fact, you subsidize their bosses for staying open right now, then you have no right to get on TV and scream at people for not "staying home" like they're supposed to.  

The only way to protect workers from this kind of avarice is to give them money and security. Except no one in the Democratic leadership is working to make it happen.  Instead their reflex is to retreat into "90s wonkery" as AOC puts it. Some of this is because they, too, are corrupt defenders of criminal capitalism.  But, from a pure public messaging standpoint, the problem is the Democrats have no idea what is happening anymore. They are fighting shadows of what the Republican political message used to be.

This is what people are talking about when they say Trump has "outflanked" the Democrats to their left. The actual Republican legislation may be as cruel and as slanted toward the wealthy as ever. But on TV, in the place where the political perception happens, the public face of their party isn't denigrating "welfare queens" anymore. He's promising to "GO BIG" with checks for everybody. Democratic leaders should counter by embracing the suggestion of members of their own party that we GO EVEN MORE BIGLY with checks for everyone every month until the crisis has ended and we've built a better more stable social safety net altogether. Instead they are proposing means tests and worrying about the deficit. All of which is why despite Trump's utter denial and bungling of the crisis that has endangered countless lives, polls are now showing that Americans approve of the way he's handling it. By failing to "go big" for real, Democrats are losing to the worst con-man in history at the worst possible moment and they have only themselves to blame.