Treasury Secretary Reveals When New Round of Relief Checks Will Reach Americans
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday that Americans could start seeing direct payments from the latest COVID-19 recovery package as early as next week.
A $900 billion relief bill is expected to pass on Monday after Congress reached a deal on Sunday. The bill will include, among other items, $600 direct payments to individual Americans who earned less than $75,000 in 2019.
The payments are smaller than the $1,200 payments that went out beginning in April after the $2.2 trillion CARES Act was passed and signed by President Donald Trump.
Mnuchin told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Monday he still expects the payments to give the country’s businesses a boost.
“The good news is this is a very, very fast way of getting money into the economy. Let me emphasize: People are going to see this money at the beginning of next week,” Mnuchin said.
Americans will get stimulus checks as soon as next week, Mnuchin says https://t.co/trYXD4oq4d
— CNBC (@CNBC) December 21, 2020
“People go out and spend this money, and that helps small business, and that helps getting more people back to work,” he said.
“So it’s very fast, it’s money that gets recirculated in the economy.”
Mnuchin has worked with Democrats for months to negotiate a second relief bill. The one expected to pass on Monday is smaller and more targeted than the CARES Act.
The agreement is exactly the kind of deal Mnuchin had sought.
He partially cited declining rates of joblessness for seeking a smaller bill. The unemployment rate last month was 6.7 percent, which is down from a high of 14.7 percent in April.
The previous high in unemployment in the last 20 years was 9.9 percent during the Great Recession in March 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Government-ordered shutdowns of businesses in March sent the unemployment rate skyrocketing in the spring. But despite coronavirus lockdowns and permanent small business closures, the jobs market has come roaring back in a manner close to the V-shaped recovery predicted by the Trump administration.
“Unemployment has come way down,” Mnuchin told CNBC. “This is now much more targeted. I expect it’s needed in a short period of time, and I think this will take us through the recovery.”
The new bill will partially replenish the Paycheck Protection Program with $284 billion in additional funding. It will also set aside $20 billion for small business grants and another $15 billion for live event venues, accusing to CNBC.
The package also will bring back enhanced unemployment benefits for a period of 10 weeks. The additional payments will be half the size of the $600 payments many Americans received from the CARES Act.
Critics of those payments argued they incentivized people to remain out of work, as many people earned more money while unemployed than they did while working.
But the direct payments Americans will begin seeing next week, according to Mnuchin, will also be smaller.
Payments from the CARES Act were $1,200 for individuals with an additional $500 per child for married couples.
The latest bill will offer $600 per individual with $600 per child for as many as two children. A family of four that made less than $150,000 in 2019 can expect a payment of $2,400, according to CBS News.
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