The $2 trillion COVID-19 coronavirus stimulus bill, which includes one-time payments to individuals, strengthened unemployment insurance, additional health-care funding and loans and grants to businesses to deter layoffs, was passed by the US Senate unanimously on Wednesday night. Today the bill was passed in the US House of Representatives.
President Donald Trump has promised to sign the legislation “immediately.” While it is unclear how quickly the government will dole out some of the money such as small business loans, the White House and congressional leaders have said some individuals will see direct payments of up to $1,200 within three weeks.
The push to pass the proposal comes a day after data showed unemployment claims skyrocketed to a record 3.3 million last week after businesses across the country closed to slow the pandemic’s spread.
MacDailyNews Take: More to come.
It’s a new world when I can read “2 trillion” and think, that’s not so bad.
Long gone are the days when Sen. Dirksen could observe, “A million here, a million there, and pretty soon you are talking real money.” A million is to a trillion as a penny is to ten thousand dollars—no more than a rounding error.
Agreed.
Passing on inflation adjustment comparison for now, the Recovery Act stimulus bill passed and signed by President Obama in February 2009 had similar goals. One glaring omission was no assistance check over $1,000 to individual U.S. citizens. Corporate pork bailouts, union road projects and green dream projects ruled the day. Typical Democrat pleasing their voters FIRST.
Unfortunately, to cut the present deal a leaner amount of Pelosi Pork to get it on the grill was swallowed. Not ideal, buts let’s hope less stupidity in this bill than funding a company that suffered a mismanagement mess and $528 million loss from Solyndra in the last recovery bill.
A businessman in the Oval Office is superior better suited and EXACTLY what the USA heeds to get it done.
Community organizer eloquent ideologue president that never founded a company did not get it done the slowest economic recovery in history after a recession.
Godspeed President Trump… 👍🏻🇺🇸🦅👏🏻
I have not commented on this issue before because most of the other comments have stuck to opinions, not flat misstatements of fact.
By using the phrase, “to cut the present deal,” you imply that there IS a deal, i.e. a contract or meeting of the minds in which each party gives up something in order to get something. If that seems unclear, read The Art of the Deal. On its face, the Act passed by both houses of Congress with near-unanimous bipartisan support appears to be “a deal,” an agreement reached by all parties with everyone giving informed consent to the deal as a unified scheme for addressing the crisis.
If it was a deal, President Trump immediately broke it.
One key provision of the deal was that the half-trillion dollars to be handed out to businesses could be allocated at Executive Branch discretion, but the process would be transparent. The Congress, and through them the American people, would receive reports from Inspectors General appointed by the President to insure that the President was not using taxpayer cash to reward his political friends and punish his political enemies in an election year (for Congress and himself).
That is what a majority of House members and roughly half of the Senate believed had happened in Ukraine. Whether you agree with them or not, that is what they believed and feared.
So hardly any Democrats and at least some Republicans were unwilling to give the President unlimited discretion over the half-trillion without any oversight. That issue was at the core of the negotiations between the Executive Branch and the congressional party caucuses. The compromise on Inspector General oversight was the heart of the compromise deal, and it had been agreed by all parties during the negotiations. Without that compromise, it would have been voted down in the House and failed to get past closure in the Senate.
In his signing message, President Trump stated that he was signing the bill and would accept the half-trillion dollars to hand out at his discretion. However he also stated that he would ignore the oversight provisions of the federal law that his representatives had negotiated and he had just signed. He, and he alone, would control what Congress could learn about how the money was spent. The Inspectors General would not be allowed to release any information without his personal approval.
I doubt that even he would funnel the entire half-trillion to the Trump Organization and the Kushner Companies, but under his version of the “deal” he could do exactly that without any risk of exposure until long past November. That is not what the bipartisan “deal” provided.
A businessman in the White House indeed.
I posted: “Unfortunately, to cut the present deal a leaner amount of Pelosi Pork to get it on the grill was swallowed.”
Show us specifically, where did I specifically mention the President you hate and absolutely despise self righteous liberal?
Answer: It does not exist. You extrapolated and made it up even referencing his best selling book a carnival trick that fools no one.
“I doubt that even he would funnel the entire half-trillion to the Trump Organization and the Kushner Companies, but under his version of the “deal” he could do exactly that without any risk of exposure until long past November.”
That tinfoil hat is on waaaayyy too tight. 🤪
“A businessman in the White House indeed.”
Indeed, totally agree. What he has done as a businessman to turn around the economy and break many economic records is absolutely remarkable for a first time politician will go down in history!
You HATE it, we get it daily and could not care less. Godspeed President Trump…👍🏻🇺🇸🦅
You didn’t mention the President, but you did reference the nonexistent “present deal,” which never really existed because he never really agreed to it. I was pointing that out.
No, “what he has done” is talk Congress into giving him a half-trillion dollars ($500,000,000,000.00) to be handed out at his discretion. He “negotiated” this deal by promising that if they gave him the public’s money, they would be kept informed on how it is spent. Congress would not have voted him the money without that condition. His representatives agreed to the provision, and it is expressly contained in the law bearing his beautiful signature.
He immediately reneged on the deal by announcing (via a written “signing message”) that he was accepting the money but rejecting the conditions under which it was appropriated. The President of the United States does not have a line-item veto power; he must either reject a bill in its entirety or allow it to become law in its entirety. That is not what he did here, He made a deal and then broke it the same day.
This was entirely consistent with his track record in private business of signing written agreements with contractors, accepting the benefits of the bargain, and then refusing to perform his obligations, knowing that his stable of lawyers would make it prohibitively expensive to litigate.
PS. “ Show us specifically, where did I specifically mention the President you hate and absolutely despise self righteous liberal?”
That would be the references to “a businessman in the White House” and “Godspeed President Trump.”
Apparently, even you don’t read your sycophantic posts.
youre now a socialist??????????
Thelonius, it’s not a new world when the orange bankruptcy king of NYC drives the economy off a cliff and you shrug. You find a way to apologize for everything the buffoon does. Same old same old.
6.5 trillion and counting for the Munchin-Kudlow socialist bailouts, about the cost of Dubya’s wars that also haven’t been paid off. This is another step down the road to ruin and you’re too busy playing partisan politics with your buddies here to notice.
You must be a Republican
he’s somebody sick and tired of both parties crony capitalism digging endless debts.
Sorry…posted in another article, but apropos here again….
“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.’ Henry Ford
The Fed (4 trill) and the Treasury (2 trill) are now again back as a tag-team. This is not a party-specific choice…both R & D’s are choosing this method and they’ve done it for a long, long time. The difference; the hole is exponentially deeper. Interestingly, we still don’t know how deep it can go, but there is a limit.
These efforts may lift the stock market and, specifically APPL (which I’m long), but a climbing stock market DOES NOT and WILL NOT mean the economy is healthy.. Please jettison that thinking on a Elon Musk rocket, so it’s never again the framework. This debt habit may now be too large to reconcile, but it’s not to late to be nothing but raging angry that our leaders and your leaders (not just a US problem) do nothing about.
Is that Henry Ford quote from his 1920’s book: “The International Jew:The World’s Foremost Problem?” I have the “Complete 4 Volumes” version, so its gonna take a while to finish.
p.s…..I’m not an anti-semite !!!
Does Trump know how to make a signature?
Didn’t even cross the T!!!! What a clown.
Hey clown, upper case “T” is not crossed.
jeeeebus! con don devotees can’t even admit that he’s a sloppy writer. trump devotee syndrome? nobody gives a sheet about signature style. it’s infinitely more concerning that someone supposedly named Tom can’t write a T
how the F can you write a T without putting the horizontal cap onto the vertical body???????
Are you stupid because you at a libturd, or are you a libturd because you are stupid?
He can sign his name however he wants, same as you, so what’s your problem? The greatest president in my lifetime is far from a con. In fact, just the opposite he is GENUINE and that’s why his supporters pack EVERY rally to overflowing and love him for speaking plain English. Get a grip…
When another’s handwriting becomes something of critical focus, are we not in very strange and unbalanced times?
That is a helluva lot more legible than mine. Or every doctor I’ve ever had.
Wow! The orange hate Libtards have been reduced to criticizing a very personal signature, seriously?
President Trump’s signature is BEAUTIFUL. The letters are ALL vertical pointed to the sky like all the skyscrapers he has built.
Another amazing chapter in the life of President Trump…🤣🇺🇸🦅
Da, komrade.
Orange Chosen One also signed an order forcing a private company to produce ventilators for his “war” effort today.
I’ve read it here before and now I agree. Despite the rhetoric, this president is entirely fine with socialism.
He thinks when he does it, he has the luxury of relabeling it something else. I don’t buy it. This is beyond usual swampy cronyism. It’s beyond corporate welfare that now is the main trait of the US economy. When the federal government sits on its hands and tells everyone that this pandemic was a flu 3 weeks ago and now is directly commanding private manufacturers in a panic, this isn’t a slight change in style of leadership. It is socialism by definition.
Considering this was the tag line Orange Chosen One has been running on for years, it’s long past time people have a real honest, respectful, reasonable discussion of what powers the federal government should have. This administration, like the half dozen before it, wants infinite power while claiming it’s all about freedom. If the average American knew how corrupt the banking system was, with lax regulation and zero real enforcement, they would revolt. Now the administration rewards the biggest bad actors (along with crumbs for the innocent victims) again.
Your post would have more validity if you had not casually lumped the “last half dozen” Administrations with the current Trump Administration as somehow being similar. Even W Bush was far better than Chump Trump. Unfortunately, Cheney was in charge of W.
In terms of digging record debts, only Clinton was fiscally responsible of the last 50 years of increasingly bad presidents. Republicans being the worst spenders, objectively proven.
Your kidding, right? Try growth during Reagan administration…
Growth not counting the two Reagan recessions, you mean? Reagan was a spendaholic like Dubya Bush.
It was the Republicans who wrote the budgets Clinton signed.
Make book on it…
https://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-under-clinton/
Of course you would assign credit only to your own party. Why are we not surprised?
If you would educate yourself, you would know that in Clinton’s first year in office, he passed what the GOP whined was the biggest tax increase in history. It was actually quite modest, shoring up Social Security and tinkering to increase taxes on the richest income brackets. Nobody felt any tax pain all through the dotcom boom, except maybe hapless Apple.
Clinton actually worked well with Gingrich to negotiate cost saving reforms. Clinton’s 1994 budget request is a testament to that. Both men contributed to improve the balance sheet.
Where are the GOP congressional fiscal hawks now? Did they die off when Cheney declared debt irrelevant?
I guess you forgot Clinton famously exclaiming several times, “guess I raised your taxes too high.”
“Where are the GOP congressional fiscal hawks now? Did they die off when Cheney declared debt irrelevant?”
No, around the time Obama and the Democrats controlled all three branches of government and nearly doubled the national debt: “When Obama was sworn in on Jan. 20, 2009, the debt was $10.626 trillion. When he left office on Jan. 20, 2017, it was $19.947 trillion.”… 🤔
“Your post would have more validity if you had not casually lumped the “last half dozen” Administrations with the current Trump Administration as somehow being similar..”
They are not, how so? Because you have not explained properly I find your statement drive by Trump bashing with ZERO validity.
“Unfortunately, Cheney was in charge of W.”
Your kidding, right? You still believe that false narrative pushed by your
party to this day. Oh well, some things never change and some never learn…
In whose world does it make sense to give trump 500 billion dollars and let him decides which businesses get any part of those taxpayers dollars. This guy couldn’t keep a casino open, and people would come in and give him money. The man is a failure and his life is a complete example of that. If his plan, the earlier tax cut for America was so great, where is all that extra money that is supposed to be pouring in. Why in public does he he say, he is for making sure preconditions are covered but doesn’t say it will be because you will pay for an extremely high price to have it if at all, cause it depends on who he is talking to which lie he tells. For goodness sake people, you which him lie and when someone points to the lie you blame the person who points to the lie. Let me clear this up for the simple minded of us, it’s the liar you should have a problem with. trump says as soon as he finishes signing a law he intends on breaking it. trump is a crook plain and simple.
I’m starting to understand you don’t care as long as he does something crazy or narrow minded that you want, but at least own up to being liars and crooks yourselves. Birds of a feather flock together. Always!! Criminals hang around other criminals, liars hang around other liars, men or women that cheat on their spouse hang around other cheater, Donald and Bill, drug users hang around other drug users, God fearing folk hang around other God fearing folk, well until recently, or maybe they weren’t all that God fearing to start with, trump is a lair, see that everyday, he is a cheat, he is a criminal and you praise him. What does that say about you? Bird of a feather.
No a difference of opinion is not this. Telling yourself you never heard trump tell a lie is a lie. If you have ever heard him speak, he was lying. This guy only knows how to bankrupt. This guy is a specialist in bankruptcy. Know how he got so familiar, he did it a lot. He went bankrupt a lot. trump is just a rich man’s kid who was such a failure that his pop kept bailing him out. For a father to do that for a son is find, a up to the pop, but the kid to lie about it and pretend he was some great success shows what kind of man that father made. trump is a liar, a cheater, criminal, you rich fathers pay attention to what trump’s daddy created. I hope you want better.
That’s President Trump to you and the rest of your ilk, Bob. Show some respect for the office even if you despise the man.
“The man is a failure and his life is a complete example of that.”
Talk about a volume of fiction!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Nuff said…