It took me some time to unravel why we are losing Coronavirus aid today. This article from Marketwatch explained it very clearly in a single sentence:
On Monday, Senate Republicans unveiled a new stimulus package, dubbed the Health, Economic Assistance, Liability Protection and Schools Act, or HEALS Act, that calls for implementing supplemental weekly unemployment benefits equal to 70% of a workers’ prior wages with a $500 cap.
What does this mean?
What switching the $600 unemployment benefit from the Federal government to States will do is strain state budgets which are already struggling due to a drop in tax revenue due to the largest recession since the great depression. With state budgets under even more stress, with higher requirements for unemployment benefits and less assistance from the Federal government, and no where to turn for tax revenue state governments will have to cut services. State budgets are generally mostly going to programs like health care and education, more unfunded mandates from the Federal government. The States will either have to limit access to Medicaid further during an economic recession and epidemic as a result of this policy, which will only make the epidemic worse, or they will have to cut funding for education which will hurt students of all ages, through fewer resources, fewer school lunches which often are the only meals students get in poor districts, or even cut access to food stamps which are seeing record levels of applicants.
Further straining state budgets who cannot simply borrow from the Federal Reserve like the Federal government can is the entire point of this latest Republican experiment in cruelty and economic suicide.
An economy cannot survive without a well educated populace.
Which is where charter schools come in, where only the rich have access to education.
The goal of switching the burden of stimulus from this economy from the Federal government is so that Republican governments in most States will
If this wasn’t bad enough already, the Ayn Rand institute who originate a lot of these plans received Federal aid money. this is almost as bad as sending tax payer dollars to fund your political campaigns on top of private donations. It is corruption to the highest level.
The same goes for all of those military contracts in the original stimulus package who will turn right around and use that same money to go fund the campaigns of people like Mr. McConnell.
The Republicans are using coronavirus aid to limit the ability for States to provide essential services to their citizens. They are taking a crisis which none of us have seen in our lifetimes and turning it upside down in an honestly quite clever way in order to further their highly partisan agenda of eliminating every part of Federal Government which benefits people of color.
Mitch McConnell has blood on his hands.
Coronavirus Aid should not be tied to Objectivist goals
