Fox regular and opinion writer for the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley, wants us to believe that the real problem we have right now isn't that the stimulus checks are too small, or that there isn't enough assistance for struggling Americans in the coronavirus relief bill that Trump finally signed on Sunday evening, but that the peons might not get back to work if unemployment benefits are too generous in the middle of a pandemic.
Heaven forbid we pay them more in emergency unemployment benefits than their low-wage jobs are paying them. Here's Riley on this weekend's Fox News Sunday bemoaning Trump's demand for the $2000 stimulus checks and whining about coronavirus lockdowns.
RILEY: I don't know if we are headed for a shutdown, Mike. I do think that Republicans however feel like the president's really pulled out the rug from under them at the last minute here. You know, people don't elect Republicans because Democrats don't spend enough money. They elect them because they want some fiscal responsibility. And the president's own negotiator, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin thought he was negotiating in good faith for a $600 payment.
I understand the president wanting to give people more money, but frankly, that is not, I think, what the country needs right now so much as they need for businesses to reopen, for the economy to get back up to speed. And these lockdowns are the problem, not the fact that checks are supposedly too small.
People need to get back to work, and to the extent that some of the unemployment insurance relief supplements in this bill are too high, there will be a disincentive for people to go back to work if they can be paid more to not work. So we have to worry about that as well.
Funny how they never mind making sure rich people have more money than they can spend, but the working class can go pound sand.
Here's more on the bill that Trump was sitting on that Riley believes is too generous:
Pandemic unemployment assistance, a lifeline for 7.3 million American workers out of work because of the coronavirus, expired at midnight Sunday morning after President Donald Trump continued to resist signing the $2.3 trillion package that combines government funding with Covid-19 relief.
The bill — the result of protracted negotiations between both parties and the Trump administration that the president himself largely sat out — includes a $900 billion Covid-19 stimulus package that would extend those unemployment benefits: $114 to $357 weekly payments to unemployed gig workers and self-employed people whose businesses have stalled.
