You may receive another $ 1,200 stimulus check, and perhaps a bonus if you return to work. You won’t face eviction right away if you can’t pay the rent. But if there is no job for you to return to, you will likely see a cut in your unemployment benefits.
Those are the provisions in the Senate Republicans’ $ 1 trillion stimulus bill that will be proposed Monday with the support of the White House, two months after House Democrats approved their own $ 3 package. trillions to respond to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“A $ 1,200 check is coming up. That will be part of the new package, “White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Sunday about CNN’s” State of the Union. “” The check is there. The reemployment bonus is there. Withholding is there. There will be breaks for small tax credits for small businesses and restaurants. All of that will be there. “
Additionally, the White House supports extending the four-month eviction moratorium that is scheduled to expire in late July, Kudlow said.
However, what will not be in the Republican proposal is aid for state and local governments, for which Democrats reserved $ 875 billion.
There will also be no continuation of the full $ 600 federal unemployment benefit under the plan.
Because the expanded benefits are slated to expire this week, administration officials suggested that an extension be approved quickly, as well as some other areas, such as protecting companies from coronavirus-related lawsuits.
“We can move very quickly with Democrats on these issues,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on “Fox News Sunday.” “We have moved quickly before and I see no reason why we cannot move quickly again. And if there are problems that take longer, we will also deal with them. ”
But broad limits of liability, a long-sought goal of the business community, are anathema to Democrats in Congress, though they have not ruled out some specific protections.
“You don’t get into a negotiation with a red line,” said Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, on CBS’s “Face the Nation”. “But you do come in with your values.”
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White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said the Republican bill, instead of offering $ 600 a week in additional unemployment benefits, would ensure that workers receive 70% of their regular salary. In NJ, the state currently pays benefits at 60% of an employee’s salary, and unemployed workers have been receiving the additional benefit of $ 600 since the end of March.
“The original unemployment benefits actually paid people to stay home, and many people actually received more money than staying home than they would return to work,” Meadows said on ABC’s “This Week.” “So the president has been very clear, our Republican senators have been very clear, we are not going to extend that provision.”
House Democrats voted in May to keep the $ 600 payments until January 31, 2021, but President Donald Trump has threatened to veto the legislation.
“They are resentful of $ 600 so that single mothers can put food on the table, so that fathers maintain the dignity of keeping their families intact and with unemployment insurance, with rental assistance, with food,” Pelosi said in CBS. “This is an emergency that they may not understand. I don’t know what they have against working families in the United States. “
An ABC News / Washington Post survey published last month said 58% percent of Americans supported extending the $ 600 benefit, while only 35% said it should end in late July.
Kudlow said the other benefits in the Republican bill would make up for the loss of any unemployment insurance payments.
“We want to pay people to go back to work,” he said on CNN. “And by the way, we are going to have, in addition to the salary cap, 70 percent, which is quite generous by any standard. In addition to that, we will have a reemployment bonus and a tax credit bonus for retention to return to work So that will more than make up for all of this. “
Pelosi said the overall figure of $ 600 was designed to facilitate the provision of additional benefits.
“The reason we had $ 600 was its simplicity,” said Pelosi. “And calculate 70 percent of someone’s salary. Not all people earn a salary. Maybe they do. They earn wages and sometimes they vary it. So why don’t we keep it simple?
In fact, state unemployment offices have struggled to handle the deluge of claims they’ve received during the pandemic, let alone bear the added burden of calculating each recipient’s additional federal benefit based on their salary.
Meadows said the federal government would intervene if necessary.
“Our goal is to make sure that it is not outdated computers that keep people from getting their benefits,” he said.
There has been a debate over whether expanded unemployment insurance discouraged workers from returning to their jobs.
“There are a lot of people who won’t go back to work because they know it’s not safe,” said Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., On CNN. “There are also a lot of people who don’t have the jobs to go back to. So I think that it is essentially a state of denial, that we should recover the economy and that everything will disappear. ”
Additionally, the $ 600 payments helped prop up an economy that went into recession as a result of the coronavirus.
A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive research group, said cutting the additional pay from $ 600 to $ 200 would cost New Jersey 98,607 jobs over the next year, as unemployed workers have less money to spend.
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Jonathan D. Salant can be reached in [email protected].
