The direct payments included in multiple rounds of coronavirus relief last year started phasing out for individuals who make more than $75,000 per year and married couples making more than $150,000 per year. Lawmakers are debating whether that cutoff was appropriate for another round of stimulus.
The left is rebelling against the idea of reducing the number of Americans eligible for $1,400 checks in President Biden's massive coronavirus relief package, saying Democrats can't be afraid to go big when it comes to pumping taxpayer money into a pandemic-stalled economy.
Jobless Americans missed $17.6 billion in benefits last month because of relief bill delays By: CNN
By Tami Luhby, CNN (CNN) Jobless Americans missed out on billions of dollars of benefits last month because then-President Donald Trump and Congress did not finalize a coronavirus relief bill until the end of December.
And many may face another break in payments next month if lawmakers again wait until the last minute to approve yet another extension of key federal pandemic unemployment programs, which are set to start expiring in mid-March.
The unemployed were left waiting for $17.6 billion in benefits in January because it took states several weeks to update their computer systems with the new relief provisions, said Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, who co-authored an analysis of the fallout from the delay released Tuesday.
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Keramet Reiter has always had a passion for social justice, possibly inherited from her parents, who served in the Peace Corps in the 1960s.
It was as an undergraduate at Harvard that she found an outlet for that passion, when she volunteered to teach at a nearby prison. Nervous at first and uncertain how her incarcerated students would react to a young woman offering to help educate them, Reiter was pleased when her fears were not realized.
“People were incredibly respectful,” she said. “I was amazed by how engaged and interested my students were.”
That experience led to a lifelong commitment to advancing educational opportunities in prisons, a journey that has taken her from the East Coast to UC Berkeley, where she attended law school and earned a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy.
Sensors can turn your porch light on as night falls and off when the sun rises, without any intervention by you. Government relief programs can be automated in a similar way. Some Democratic lawmakers are pushing to add so-called automatic stabilizers to President Joe Biden’s stimulus proposals working their way through Congress. The idea is to enact spending measures that kick in as economic conditions deteriorate now or in future downturns and fade out as things improve.