(Reuters) – When the US Congress passed a pandemic bill on Monday, Meghan Meyer, a single mother in Lincoln, Nebraska, thought she would get a break from the daily struggle to feed and house her two children during a period of unprecedented health and economy. crisis.
The next day, President Donald Trump declared the long-awaited aid package a “shame” and said he would not sign it into law, denouncing some of his spending measures, while calling for more stimulus controls for most Americans.
By the weekend, he had refused to move.
This leaves Meyer, who is on unpaid sick leave in the customer service of retailer TJ Maxx in May, as she is at risk of severe COVID, facing the edge of a financial rock. She is one of about 14 million Americans whose emergency unemployment benefits, introduced by Congress when the pandemic struck in March, ended on Saturday.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Meyer, 39, told Reuters in a telephone interview. To get to 2020, Meyer said she had to rely on friends and charities to help put food on the table, pay her rent, cover the family dog’s medical expenses, and buy Christmas presents for her children.
“I resisted and I resisted,” she said.
The new aid bill will be extended through mid-March programs that support the self-employed and the unemployed for more than half a year. It also provides an additional $ 300 a week through mid-March to all those receiving unemployment benefits, about 20.3 million people. And it is extending until January a moratorium on evictions to expire on December 31 and offering $ 25 billion in emergency rental assistance.
Many economists agree that aid is insufficient and more will be needed after Democratic President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20th. Biden called the bill “advance.”
Negotiated by Trump’s own Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and Republican Party congressional leaders, the bill was sent to the president’s Florida beach resort, where he is staying for vacation, pending his possible signing. On Saturday, in tweets, Trump signaled that he is not yet willing to sign the bill, despite requests from lawmakers to show kindness during Christmas.
“I just want to get our people $ 2,000, rather than the $ 600 mess,” he posted on Twitter on Saturday, referring to the bill’s stimulus checks, while continuing to discuss the November elections, while making unfounded allegations about electoral fraud.
Trump had not criticized the terms of the aid package before it went to the House of Representatives and Senate to vote.
As the blockade of the pandemic affected the economy in March, Congress rushed to receive emergency unemployment benefits as part of the $ 2 trillion CARES Act. At the time, lawmakers did not foresee that help would be needed beyond Christmas and could not reach an agreement to extend the benefits until last weekend.
Meyer, like others, has been looking at declining benefits for the past six months after a CARES program that gave him $ 600 a week in extra pay without a job expired in July and continued to exhaust his severance pay. emergency unemployment compensation.
That left her with extended benefits of just $ 154 a week through Saturday, which would rise to $ 454 if Trump gives in and signs the bill. If not, Meyer won’t get anything.
“It’s the difference between whether or not we have enough food, whether I can pay for my car insurance, whether I can have gas to go to a food bank,” she said.
Meyer said she voted for Trump in 2016, but was quickly stopped by her incumbent behavior and described her opposition to the aid package as “mischievous.”
“Squeeze” the growth
US job growth slowed after an initial comeback, when home orders were lifted over the summer and a new wave of coronavirus infections now threatens to affect recovery.
Andrew Stettner, a senior colleague of the non-partisan think tank The Century Foundation, said the delay in improvement will slow recovery, even though most Americans are vaccinated and life returns to normal in 2021.
“If you don’t have that money circulating in the economy, it’s going to tighten things up,” Stettner said.
Like Meyer, most people who are no longer eligible for federal unemployment benefits will be left with no income because most states provide poor assistance, he said.
About 9 million Americans who would not normally qualify for unemployment insurance, including the self-employed and concert workers, received pandemic unemployment assistance (PUA) until its expiration along with other CARES programs on Saturday, Stettner said.
Among them is 54-year-old artist Marji Rawson from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who on a normal year would run a stand at art festivals across the country. These festivals may not return until June, but Saturday’s Rawson will lose about $ 150 a week in the PUA he relied on throughout the pandemic.
“It’s as if this world isn’t already full of anxiety, now we have this on top,” Rawson said.
Reporting by Simon Lewis; Editing by Mary Milliken, Michelle Price and Leslie Adler