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Category: covid relief

  • DeSantis Transferred $92 Million to Project Helping Developer Who Donated to Him

    Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration is planning to use $92 million of leftover COVID-19 federal relief funds to help pay for a highway interchange, a project that directly benefits one of his major donors, a new report finds. According to The Washington Post, which filed an open records request to uncover much of the information in its reporting, an interchange project near…

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  • Almost 7 Million People Are Predicted to Lose Medicaid Due to “Technicalities”

    The marked disruption that characterized the initial years of COVID-19, while distressing and destructive, also bore with it some radical implications. Jarred out of the course of our everyday lives, it seemed as if we might reexamine our assumptions and perhaps demand that the limited state assistance on offer continue, or even grow? So it had seemed, but those possibilities were soon foreclosed.

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As COVID-Era Funding Dries Up, Activists Fight Austerity in City Budget Battles

    During the pandemic, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal aid from both the Trump and Biden administration flowed to state and municipal governments, allowing for assistance to struggling businesses, expansion of unemployment benefits, emergency assistance for schools, and public health needs. This also became an unexpected time of power for workers, as tight labor markets gave them greater…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Some guaranteed basic income programs are ending, even as they gain popularity nationwide

    By: Josiah Bates

    In the wake of the economic crisis driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, cities explored universal basic income programs to help those affected financially.

    Guaranteed income was a lifesaver for one single Atlanta mother.

    When the city of Atlanta launched the Income Mobility Program for Atlanta Community Transformation (IMPACT) last January, this Black 29-year-old mother of two, who requested anonymity, says she applied for the program the moment she heard about it.

    “Every day was a struggle,” said the young woman who earns about $18,000 a year working at a department store. “I have two kids. I work as much as I can, and it still wasn’t enough.”

    The IMPACT program provides $500 a month to qualified residents who are at least 18 years old and have an income that is up to 200% of the federal poverty line which was $13,590 in 2022. The young mother started getting payments last March and used the money for necessities like groceries, clothing and transportation. She’s even saved a little bit of money.

    “This has meant everything to us this past year,” she says.

    But she and hundreds of poor Black families are about to lose that small safety net.

    Several guaranteed income pilot programs, including ones in Chicago and Atlanta, are scheduled to end this year, despite encouraging data that shows how important they’ve been. The mom in Atlanta is scheduled to receive her last payment in March. She has not heard anything about the city extending the program. Atlanta officials did not return phone calls about the future of the pilot.

    In the wake of the economic crisis driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, cities explored universal basic income programs (or more appropriately guaranteed income plans) to help those affected financially. The programs provide cash payments to low-income families.

    At least 45 cities in the country started some kind of guaranteed income pilot program in 2020 or a few years preceding. The number of programs increased in the pandemic’s wake. Generally, a lottery determines recipients from a pool of eligible applicants. Payments vary from $200 to $1,000 a month. Some cities issue bi-weekly payments.

    “I was headed towards a deep depression, literally just a week prior to getting the call that I was accepted to the program,” Shamonique Jones, a Newark, New Jersey, resident told ABC News. Jones is a single mother who lives with her four children in a one-bedroom apartment. “I didn’t know how I was gonna get my kids’ uniforms [for school] … I was able to use that to get them their uniforms for school and be able to help us with the holidays and be able to provide Christmas presents for them. It just saved our lives.”

    Tashonna, a 24-year-old Louisville woman, told the Courier-Journal that her monthly payment of $500 from the city’s guaranteed income program lightens her burden. “It gives you a really big cushion to just make those decisions. If I have $500, do I still need another job or is this enough for me?”

    The pandemic disproportionately affected Black households, a number of which already survived in poverty. Before the outbreak, the unemployment rate for Black citizens in America was just over 6%. By the time COVID-19 hit, it exceeded 16%.

    Mayors for Guaranteed Income, a coalition that advocates for more cities to adopt guaranteed income programs, released a dataset that included demographic details and spending information on 20 pilot programs in America. Forty-one percent of the program participants were Black, and 77% of them were women.

    Since many of these programs are pilots, they have an end date. Atlanta, which has the highest income inequality among the largest U.S. cities, started its guaranteed income program in early 2022. The Urban League of Greater Atlanta, which did not respond to requests for comment about the program’s future, distributed the funds. The program is scheduled to end this May. The Chicago Resilient Communities Pilot program ends in August. Participants get $500 a month.

    “I’m not sure what we’re going to do when we stop getting [these] payments,” the Atlanta mother said. I’m not looking forward to that.”

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Financial Technology Firms Made “Massive Profits” on PPP Loans, Engaged in Fraud

    Originally published by ProPublica. Financial technology firms at the front lines of approving loans through the Paycheck Protection Program — intended to help small businesses survive during the pandemic — lacked fraud controls, chased high fees to the detriment of some borrowers and sometimes exploited their business relationships to arrange suspect loans for the companies’ own executives.

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • COVID-19 Relief Spending Pushed Poverty To Record Low In 2021

    By: Arthur Delaney

    WASHINGTON — Poverty fell to a new low last year thanks to new federal spending passed in response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to new federal data released Tuesday.

    Extra unemployment benefits, stimulus checks and a monthly child allowance helped push the poverty rate to 7.8% in 2021, according to an annual Census Bureau poverty measure that accounts for tax benefits and stimulus payments. The rate had been 9.1% in 2020.

    The monthly child benefit slashed child poverty to 5.2%. Both the overall and child poverty figures are the lowest on record, officials said.

    “Refundable tax credits, including the child tax credit, kept 9.6 million people out of poverty in 2021,” the Census Bureau’s Liana Fox told reporters on Tuesday.

    Democrats included the various relief policies in a $1.9 trillion bill called the American Rescue Plan, which passed Congress on a party-line basis in March 2021. The bill represented Democrats’ vision of a more humane political economy that better supports parents and laid-off workers.

    The bill provided $1,400 stimulus checks to most Americans, added $300 to weekly unemployment benefits, and gave parents as much as $300 per minor child each month from July through December.

    Republicans pilloried the Rescue Plan as too much spending on an economy that was already improving, and they have blamed it for the record price inflation that has tanked consumer sentiment this year.

    Economists have said that yes, the bill did contribute to inflation, though there’s an ongoing debate over how much prices would have risen anyway due to pandemic-related supply chain problems.

    The Census Bureau’s “official” poverty measure, which doesn’t factor expenses, omits key sources of income, and fails to account for geographical differences in costs such as rent, showed a slight increase last year from 11.4% to 11.6%, which officials said was not a statistically significant change. Though it’s outdated as a poverty measure, the federal government uses the official threshold — $27,740 for a family of four last year — to set eligibility for various federal programs, such as food benefits.

    Democrats celebrated early estimates suggesting that their temporary changes to the child tax credit, which provided monthly payments to parents in the second half of last year, produced a record decline in child poverty. Still, inflation has remained a top concern for voters.

    But Tuesday’s release from the Census Bureau showed that early estimates showing a sharp drop in child poverty were right. The supplemental poverty measure, which accounts for tax benefits, showed that child poverty declined from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% last year, the decline resulting almost entirely from the six rounds of monthly payments.

    “It is pretty stunning,” Indivar Dutta-Gupta, president of the Center for Law and Social Policy, said in an interview.

    “This was obviously a very well designed and targeted program if your goal was to keep kids out of poverty.”

    The Census Bureau has only published its supplemental poverty rate since 2009, but experts at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy have said the 2021 child rates would still be the lowest on record according to their analysis of historical data.

    The vast majority of American families automatically received the child tax credit payments as advance monthly checks from the IRS starting last July, even if they had little or no income and therefore no federal tax burden.

    “We knew that this was the greatest policy impacting levels of child poverty in the nation’s history,” Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) told HuffPost on Tuesday.

    “It’s an extraordinary breakthrough.”

    But the lack of an income requirement ― the same thing that made the policy so effective at reducing child poverty ― proved an insurmountable political obstacle. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) refused to go along with a planned continuation of the payments last December, complaining to his colleagues that his constituents told him parents wasted the money on drugs.

    Democrats have said they may try to negotiate with Republicans to revive the monthly benefit in some form, though such a deal is unlikely to come together anytime soon. Republicans, for their part, didn’t have much to say about low child poverty last year.

    “You can always end poverty by taking money and just giving it to people that are poor, which is a nice thing to do, but not going to solve the problem long term,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) told HuffPost.

    Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) answered a question about child poverty by talking about inflation. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Tuesday that inflation had once again risen in August.

    “Three-quarters of families say they are stressed by inflation under Biden and the Democrats, which is why we’re going to continue to talk about that,” Barrasso said.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Child Tax Credit: Parents miss the money as inflation rises

    By: GABRIELLA CRUZ-MARTINEZ.

    See original post here.

    Zebulon Newton received the last monthly Child Tax Credit payment of $550 for his two children on December 15th.

    Five months after the credits expired, it’s getting harder to make ends meet. With gas prices surging, costs of grocery bills and day care eroding savings, record-high inflation has left little room for the family of four to front emergency costs, said the North Carolina resident.

    “Our daughter with down syndrome had heart surgery at age four, fortunately the Child Tax Credit helped relieve some of the financial anxiety of medical costs,” said Newton, age 40. “But now our budgets are nearly $600 short each month.”

    The financial pressure is driving Newton, a stay-at-home dad, to look for work to help his wife cover additional expenses. But it’s difficult because his four-year-old daughter requires seven therapy sessions a week, two of which they pay for. To save money, the family found cheaper daycare – just a three-hour program for $200 a month. They also thrift clothes twice a year for their four- and seven-year-old.

    “For six months, childhood life got better,” Newton said. “You can’t deny that.”

    A recent study led by researchers from the Center for Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University, found that the monthly distribution of tax credit payments kept 1 in 10 children from experiencing a “spell of poverty” throughout the year – as opposed to when payments were delivered in a lump sum during tax season.

    The monthly installments reduced income volatility, which kept households from slipping under the poverty line from July through December 2021. The study builds on new evidence that shows the majority of Child Tax Credit recipients spent the credits on children’s clothing, food, and childcare expenses, costs that are now rising rapidly.

    “Having some regular inflow of cash is really critical for families,” Christopher Wimer, co-author of both studies and Columbia University co-director of the Center for Poverty & Social Policy, told Yahoo Money. “The Child Tax Credit allowed people to take a breath and served as a resource to help pay for kids and raise children.”

    Parents spend CTC on children

    Last year, the Internal Revenue Service paid out six months of advance Child Tax Credit payments – starting in July – worth up to $250 per child ages 6 through 17 and up to $300 per child under 6.

    The payments reached 61.2 million children by the year end, and reduced the monthly child poverty rate by 30%. According to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, the credits prevented 3.7 million children from falling into poverty by December 2021.

    Since the credits were fully refundable, families earning little to no income were able to access the credits for the first time. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the majority of families earning under $35,000 per year spent most of their CTC payments on food, utilities, housing and education.

    “Maybe the credit amounts weren’t necessarily life altering for some,” said Wimer, “but they gave the lowest income families who historically have been shut out of these programs the opportunity to invest in children. For the first time, many were able to just get through the day a little easier.”

    As the summer rolls in, many families that received the advanced CTC payments last year have likely gotten the second half of the CTC through their tax refund. How they are spending the money hasn’t changed, according to Census data.

    “Parents’ spending has been consistent when it comes to the Child Tax Credit,” Joanna Ain, associate director of policy at Prosperity Now, told Yahoo Money. “The majority are using the money from the tax refund to afford food, clothing, school supplies and rent. But all of these expenses have gone up, and that money is going to run out.”

    Already, in early February 2022, close to 35% of adults living in households with children struggled to cover usual costs without the CTC.

    “I’m not a pessimistic person,” Ain said, “but I think we’re looking at a difficult couple of years.”

    Monthly cash payments reduce poverty year round

    The tax filing season often provides families with a financial boost in income once tax refunds are mailed in. This year, it was no different as millions of families claimed the other half of their expanded CTC.

    According to data from Columbia University, once the annual lump sum of Earned Income Tax Credit and expanded CTC rolled in, the monthly poverty rate fell from 14.4% in February 2022 to 10.8% in March 2022. For children, the monthly poverty rate fell from an estimated 23% in February to 11% in March, and rose back to 23% by May – and will likely remain above 22% for the rest of the year.

    “Parents generally use the tax return to pay back debts,” said Ain. “In the upcoming months, we’re going to see these families’ needs grow because the tax return money has been already used on rent or childcare costs this summer.”

    To reduce child poverty rates throughout the year, researchers from Columbia University suggest monthly CTC payments instead of a lump sum payment at tax time. According to their analysis, the rate of child poverty consistently fell by an average 6.8 percentage points when the CTC was delivered monthly.

    In other words, a monthly installment of the Child Tax Credit cuts child poverty by one-third each month.

    “When I used to work in sales, April was the time most people would come in and buy big ticket items like a TV and furniture,” said Newton. “But during the Child Tax Credit, you didn’t hear about people spending like that. People just went about their routine and made sure they had enough food for their kids at the end of week.”

    According to Newton, while his family received close to $5,000 in tax refund this year through the Child Tax Credit – they have budgeted the cash carefully. Still, he admits it can be hard for some folks to make mistakes after getting a lump sum payment.

    “There’s this real value of the monthly installments because families can count on it if it’s a permanent program,” Wimer said. “You’re more likely to devote it to your routine expenses, it’s essentially a lifeline.”

    The post Child Tax Credit: Parents miss the money as inflation rises appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Did Stimulus Checks Cause Inflation?

    By: John Csiszar

    See original post here.

    America stayed afloat during the pandemic thanks to a $5 trillion avalanche of money transferred from the government back to the people during 2020-21. The biggest share, according to The New York Times, was paid directly to households and businesses.

    More than $1 trillion made its way into personal bank accounts through direct stimulus payments and advance Child Tax Credits alone. Trillions more reached them indirectly through enhancements to programs like SNAP.

    Prices soon began increasing across the entire economy, and not long after, inflation was rising at its fastest rate in 40 years.

    It’s easy to draw a straight cause-and-effect line between the two events, but the connection between today’s high inflation and the largest cash injection in America’s economic history is a bit more complicated than that.

    The Payments Fueled Inflation — But Not All of It

    Inflation is a normal and natural side effect of economic expansion. As businesses grow, they hire more workers, unemployment falls and households have more money to spend, so demand for goods and services increases, which causes prices to rise.

    The economic impact of the pandemic, however, was neither normal nor natural, and the same could be said for today’s 8.3% inflation rate, which is finally trending down a bit after resting for months at a 40-year high, according to the Wall Street Journal.

    In times of normal economic expansion, prices rise slowly as money slowly enters the economy, so it stands to reason that a sudden influx of trillions of stimulus dollars would send prices up quickly.

    So are the stimulus payments to blame for today’s high inflation, as some voices on the politically toxic subject would have you believe? There’s no question that the payments are responsible for at least some of it — but how much?

    The most reliable approximation comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which estimated at the end of March that government stimulus may have added three percentage points to the national inflation rate.

    There Is No One Thing That Caused Prices To Rise

    Despite all the controversy, according to Fortune, economists generally agree on some of the causes behind the high inflation that has defined the economy over the last several months:

    • The pandemic shifted consumer demand away from services toward goods, which left producers unable to keep up with demand.
    • Factory closures from early in the pandemic reduced supply just as demand was rising, which sent prices up even further.
    • Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a spike in oil prices, which increased the cost of both manufacturing and shipping, while also forcing up the price of wheat and other commodities.

    On top of that, the U.S. was dealing with a labor shortage, leaving many businesses that had been shuttered for months unable to meet rising demand — much of which was due to stimulus payments — when they were finally able to open.

    What About the Rest of the World?

    Those who draw a straight line between stimulus payments and generationally high inflation have two indisputable facts on their side, according to ABC News:

    • No country distributed anywhere near as much stimulus money to its people as the United States
    • No country was hit as hard by rising inflation as the United States

    That’s as close to a smoking gun as stimulus opponents could ever hope for, but it’s also a simplification. High inflation has been a worldwide phenomenon — but stimulus payments were not.

    Other countries that reacted to the virus with comparatively passive monetary policies suffered from similarly high inflation. In the European Union, for example, inflation hit 7.5% — close to America’s rate — despite limited stimulus that never approached the scale of America’s payments.

    In the End, It Was the Worst of Both Worlds at the Same Time

    Can a huge injection of cash into the economy cause prices to rise? You bet.

    According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), “If the money supply grows too big relative to the size of an economy, the unit value of the currency diminishes; in other words, its purchasing power falls and prices rise.”

    That describes the quantity theory of money, which is among the oldest and most primary economic concepts — but it’s not the only game in town.

    The IMF elaborates with this: “Supply shocks that disrupt production, such as natural disasters, or raise production costs, such as high oil prices, can reduce overall supply and lead to ‘cost-push’ inflation, in which the impetus for price increases comes from a disruption to supply.”

    Post-pandemic America experienced both at the same time — massive stimulus payments increased the quantity of money in the economy, which caused demand to soar just as supply shocks disrupted production and shipping.

    Did stimulus checks cause inflation? Not exactly — but they certainly played a role.

    The post Did Stimulus Checks Cause Inflation? appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • GOP Threatens to Hold COVID Funding Hostage to Preserve Trump Immigration Policy

    Senate Republicans on Tuesday threatened to tank a new $10 billion coronavirus relief package unless Democrats allow a vote on an amendment to preserve Title 42, a Trump-era border expulsion policy that the Biden administration is moving to end after months of sustained pressure from immigrant rights groups.

    Late Tuesday, Republicans in the upper chamber blocked a procedural effort to begin consideration of the bipartisan Covid-19 aid measure, which includes money to help the U.S. purchase coronavirus test kits, therapeutics, and vaccines. Public health advocates have criticized the bill’s exclusion of funds to combat the pandemic globally.

    “I think there’ll have to be an amendment on Title 42 in order to move the bill,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters ahead of Tuesday’s procedural vote. “There’s several other amendments that we’re going to want to offer, and so we’ll need to enter into some kind of agreement to process these amendments in order to go forward with the bill.”

    Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) accused Republicans of holding coronavirus relief “hostage for an extraneous issue.”

    The GOP’s stonewalling comes as the Biden White House is urgently requesting Covid-19 funding to keep critical pandemic response programs alive. The administration has already been forced to wind down a program that covered coronavirus testing and treatment for the uninsured.

    One private testing company, Quest Diagnostics, quickly seized the opportunity to announce that patients without Medicare, Medicaid, or private insurance coverage will be charged $125 for one of its PCR kits.

    Politico reported Tuesday that Republican obstruction over Title 42 “could stall for weeks what Biden called much-needed coronavirus aid, unless senators can reach a deal before they plan to leave on Thursday or Friday.”

    “Without a breakthrough, the aid won’t be approved until late April or perhaps May,” the outlet noted.

    First issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March 2020 despite internal objections from experts, the Title 42 order allows immigration authorities to quickly expel migrants and asylum seekers at the border, using the coronavirus pandemic as a justification. Such a policy was long advocated by Stephen Miller, former President Donald Trump’s xenophobic immigration adviser.

    For months, the Biden administration rebuffed calls from rights groups and legal experts to end Title 42, under which more than a million migrants have been turned away at the southern U.S. border and often sent back into dangerous conditions in their home countries.

    Last week, the CDC announced that Title 42 would no longer be in effect as of May 23, outraging anti-immigrant Republicans and drawing objections from some Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.).

    It’s not clear whether those Democrats would be willing to vote with Republicans to push a Title 42 amendment into the Covid-19 funding bill.

    The inclusion of such an amendment would likely endanger the legislation’s prospects in the House. Late Tuesday, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) — which has dozens of members in the lower chamber — said it “opposes any amendment to the Covid relief package that would attempt to reinstate the Trump-initiated Title 42.”

    “The pandemic was used as an excuse to implement Title 42 and deny asylum-seekers their legal right to due process,” the CHC added. “Title 42 should not be used as border policy. Instead, we must work to address the root causes of migration, border efficiency, legal pathways to citizenship, and update our outdated immigration laws through immigration reform to address cyclical migration patterns.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump’s UK Golf Resorts Claimed Millions in COVID Aid While He Was President

    Presumptive Republican nominee for president Donald Trump visits Trump International Golf Links on June 25, 2016, in Aberdeen, Scotland.

    Former President Donald Trump’s golf resorts in Scotland claimed nearly $4 million in COVID aid from the British government while he was in office, financial filings in the U.K. show.

    The ex-president’s struggling resorts, Trump Turnberry in Ayrshire and Trump International Scotland in Aberdeenshire, lost millions last year amid the pandemic (whether counted in dollars or pounds) and received hefty furlough payments after slashing their workforce. The U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause prohibits federal officials from taking payments from foreign governments, although Trump got around that by ostensibly turning over control of his company to his children while he was in office, although he retained his financial interest in his family-owned companies.

    The British government provided the payments after the Turnberry and Trump International resorts reported $8.9 million in losses in 2020. The company’s filings partially blamed the losses on Brexit — the U.K.’s withdrawal from the European Union, which Trump ardently supported — saying it had disrupted supply chains, the BBC first reported.

    “Brexit has also impacted our business as supply chains have been impacted by availability of drivers and staff, reducing deliveries and availability of certain product lines,” one filing said, according to The Independent.

    The company also blamed the British government’s lockdown policies. Even though 273 workers at the two courses were let go, Eric Trump said in one of the filings that government COVID aid was “helpful to retain as many jobs as possible” but that “uncertainty of the duration of support and the pandemic’s sustained impact meant that redundancies were required to prepare the business for the long term effects to the hospitality industry.”

    A review by The Guardian found that the filings show that the two Scottish resorts owe nearly $180 million to Trump personally, even though their combined assets are currently valued only at about $133 million.

    Trump opened the Aberdeenshire resort in 2012 after a legal fight with local residents and environmental activists. It has lost money every year since it opened. The Trump Organization bought Turnberry in 2014 for a reported $60 million and said it has spent $150 million to develop it. That resort has similarly failed to post a profit in any year since the Trump purchase.

    Those transactions have raised various suspicions over the years. Though Trump has long financed purchases with borrowed money, he ponied up $60 million in cash for the Turnberry property just as he was defaulting on a $640 million loan from Deutsche Bank, and suing the bank claiming an inability to pay. The Avaaz Foundation, a U.S.-based human rights watchdog group, issued a report in 2019 calling on the Scottish government to use its laws against money-laundering to investigate the purchase.

    The Avaaz report suggested that Trump had acquired the Turnberry property during a “cash buying spree” and that his transactions had links to “locations highly conducive to money laundering such as Panama and the former Soviet Union.” A Scottish lawmaker in February called for an “unexplained wealth order,” which would allow authorities to investigate where the purchase funds had come from, but that motion was defeated in the Scottish parliament. (Although still part of the U.K., Scotland has its own legislature and considerable autonomy in internal matters.) Avaaz asked a Scottish court to force lawmakers to investigate but a judge ruled against that request last month, while leaving the door open for the parliament to approve a probe if its members chose to.

    “I wish to make it clear that I express no view whatsoever on the question of whether the [criminal law] requirements were or appeared to be met in the case of President Trump,” the judge wrote. “Further, for aught yet seen the Scottish Ministers may still make a UWO application in relation to President Trump’s Scottish assets.”

    Lord Advocate Dorothy Bain, Scotland’s top prosecutor, will now decide whether to pursue a criminal investigation against Trump or his company.

    “The law may have been clarified, but a cloud of suspicion still hangs over Trump’s purchase of Turnberry,” Nick Flynn, the legal director for Avaaz, said in a statement. “By any measure, the threshold to pursue a UWO to investigate the purchase has easily been crossed. The Lord Advocate should take urgent action in the interest of the rule of law and transparency, and demand a clear explanation of where the $60m used to buy Turnberry came from.”

    The Trump Organization dismissed the effort as a “ridiculous charade” and “self-indulgent, baseless nonsense.”

    Trump, who faces a criminal investigation in Manhattan related to his business practices and a separate probe by the New York state attorney general, is also facing a new criminal investigation by the Westchester County district attorney into the Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York (about 30 miles north of New York City). Prosecutors are looking at whether the company “misled local officials about the property’s value to reduce its taxes,” according to The New York Times, which is a subject of inquiry for other prosecutors as well, in relation to other Trump businesses.

    Former Trump Organization vice president Michael Cohen, who served prison time after pleading guilty to numerous federal charges, testified to Congress in 2019 that it was routine for the company to provide misleading numbers.

    “It was my experience that Mr. Trump inflated his total assets when it served his purposes, such as trying to be listed amongst the wealthiest people in Forbes,” Cohen told Congress, “and deflated his assets to reduce his real estate taxes.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Democrats thought giving voters cash was the key to success. So what happened?

    The benefits were handed out. But they don’t seem to be translating politically. In some cases, voters don’t even credit Biden for them.

    By Sam Stein

    When they took power this past winter, Democrats made a commitment to not repeat what many viewed as a critical misstep of the Obama years. The legislation they passed would do two things well: make sure that the benefits were frontloaded and that the impact was tangible. 

    The result was a Covid relief package that included direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, $300 per week in unemployment insurance supplements, and an expansion of the child tax credit for a year.

    Nine months later, whatever political benefits were supposed to accrue from that package have seemingly faded. The public’s support for the direct payments has been overtaken by its concerns about the lingering pandemic. The federal unemployment insurance benefits ended in September with no apparent appetite by the feds or state governments to extend them. And while Democrats are seeking to extend the expanded child tax credit past its expiration date this December, recent polling data suggests that they are getting little credit for it.

    A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released last week showed that 61 percent of respondents said they’d received the credit — a $300 payment per month for every child under the age of 7 and a $250-per-month payment for every child under the age of 17. But only 39 percent of respondents said that the payment had a major impact on their lives. And while 47 percent of respondents credited Democrats for passing the expanded child tax credit, just 38 percent credited President Joe Biden. 

    Those numbers are causing agita on Capitol Hill, where there is growing concern that in a rush to continue legislative momentum around infrastructure and Biden’s Build Back Better social spending plan, the party has failed to hammer home the benefits of their first big bill: the American Rescue Plan.

    “It’s great to deliver and do things, but you have to actually go out and tell the f—ing world about it,” conceded one top Senate Democratic aide who worked on getting the child tax credit passed. “That’s not a two-month project. It has to keep going.”

    It’s also compelling officials in the party to revisit the calculation they made in January. Giving people money may not be the dispositive political winner that they imagined. 

    “I believe we should do popular things and use our power while we have it,” said Adam Jentleson, a party operative who now finds himself among the more vocal progressive activists in D.C. “But you should do them because they’re the right thing to do but not with the expectation that there would be a big political payoff.”

    As Jentleson and others noted, the moral case for passing the child tax credit remains quite profound. Researchers at Columbia University found that 59.3 million children nationwide received payments in July 2021. That month alone, they wrote, the program “kept 3 million children from poverty.” Extended through its duration, the program could “reduce monthly child poverty by up to 40 percent.” Combined with all Covid-related relief, “it could contribute to a 52 percent reduction in monthly child poverty.” 

    Democrats negotiating the Build Back Better legislative package have pushed to extend the program expansion until 2025. And Biden himself has leaned into that policy specifically as a way to sell the larger reconciliation package. 

    “The jobs numbers also remind us that we have important work ahead of us, and important investments we need to make,” Biden said on Friday, after the release of an underwhelming jobs report. “We’re going to help build families, and we’re going to help them afford to care for their new baby, a child, an elderly relative. [We’re] going to extend the tax credit for families with children.”

    The question confronting the campaign apparatuses within the party, however, is how can they turn any such extension into actual electoral positives. For some, it’s simple: You keep building a record that you can take to the voters as a case for remaining in power. 

    “All of this is part of the stew you need to put together to create a post-pandemic, economic boom in 2022,” said one top party operative, in reference to both the child tax credit, the infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better initiative. “And if you succeed, there is a clear argument to make that Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress came in, got to work, rescued the economy and put money in your pocket. You can see the ads. But it’s an ugly path to get there.”

    But others say that Democrats’ ambitions need to be recalibrated a bit; that there are no panaceas for electoral success and that the real benefits won’t be realized in 2022 or maybe even 2024, but in the reshaping of the electorate down the road. 

    Ethan Winter, a senior analyst at Data for Progress, does polling for Fighting Chance for Families, a group that is working to extend the child tax credit. The data he has shows wide support for the expanded tax credit among Democrats and independents. But the more interesting number, he argued, was found in the crosstabs.

    Republican parents who have gotten the benefits, he said, support Biden at a higher rate than their non-parent Republican peers. And that, Winter added, is a decent thread of optimism for Democrats who thought the policy would serve them well both morally and politically. 

    “I think there was a triumphalist narrative that if we provide this benefit, we will remake American politics,” Winter said. “But I think this misreads the literature on policy feedback slightly. The place where this works is at the margins. That’s where the struggle is waged.” 

    He went on from there.

    “It’s really hard to remake the electorate, but if you can provide clear benefits to Republican parents, then you can pick off maybe not the module Republican parent, but the marginal one. And if you can pick up the marginal ones, then you can maybe win the next election and that solidifies it even further.”

    Original article: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/11/democrats-cash-success-covid-relief-515765

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    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • The best antidote to poverty could be cold, hard cash

    By Bryan Walsh

    Experts in philanthropy are gradually coming around to the idea that simply giving poor people cash — rather than services or in-kind benefits — is the most efficient way to make progress on severe poverty.

    The big picture: The divergent economic experiences between rich and poor countries during the pandemic has shown the value of directly giving money to those in need.

    • With extreme poverty in developing countries spiking during the pandemic, direct cash giving is more important than ever.

    What’s happening: GiveDirectly — a charity that pioneered the practice of sending money to people in poverty, no strings attached — recently announced it sent $1,000 each to more than 178,000 U.S. households in need during the pandemic, with plans to reach another 20,000 over the next few months.

    • GiveDirectly works with Propel — a company that provides software that helps Americans digitally manage food stamps and other benefits — to identify households in need and quickly send out money.
    • The direct cash giving model’s greatest advantage is its “exceptional efficiency,” says Alex Nawar, GiveDirectly’s U.S. director, who estimates that 98–99 cents of every dollar donated to the charity’s U.S. pandemic program goes directly to giving, with little required for overhead.

    Between the lines: GiveDirectly’s program, as successful as it was, is a drop in the bucket compared to the billions in direct stimulus checks and expanded jobless benefits from the federal government that have flowed to Americans during the pandemic.

    • That aid — much of it cash — not only prevented much of the massive economic pain Americans could have suffered during the pandemic, but it actually helped reduce the U.S. poverty rate in 2020.
    • But what both private philanthropy and government aid demonstrate is the power of rapidly distributed cash to shield the needy from catastrophe and actually lift people out of poverty.

    What they’re saying: “It was really exciting to see the U.S. embrace cash as a first solution for the financial security problems people are facing through the pandemic,” Nawar says. 

    • Globally, there has been a 148% increase in cash social programs during COVID-19, with a total of 782 cash transfer programs being implemented or planned across 186 countries.
    • “I think there’s a lot of room for both governments and NGOs and other kind of disaster responders to increase how often we use cash, because we know it’s more efficient than delivering in-kind aid,” says Nawar.

    By the numbers: Poverty declined in the U.S. during the pandemic but not in the poorest countries in the world.

    • The number of people in extreme poverty — defined as households spending less than $1.90 a day per person — had fallen from 1.9 billion people to 648 million people in 2019, even as the global population increased by 2.5 billion people.
    • Extreme poverty levels were projected to fall to 537 million people by 2030, but the pandemic interrupted this trend, with the number increasing for the first time since 1997 to an estimated 588 million people.
    • “There are people who might have exited poverty in the last few years or the last decade through growth and all of the progress that has been made, and unfortunately, have fallen straight back in,” Vishal Gujadhur, deputy director of development policy and finance at the Gates Foundation, told Fast Company recently.

    How it works: During the pandemic, GiveDirectly worked with the government of Togo — where half the citizens live below the poverty line — to identify and distribute millions of dollars in cash aid to those in need. 

    • To speed the process up, GiveDirectly used satellite images to identify tell-tale images of poverty, like houses with thatched roofs rather than metal ones, as well as mobile phone data, employing an algorithm to find people who more often made short, cheap calls — another sign of poverty.

    Details: A 2018 review of 165 studies of cash-giving programs found it tends to increase spending on food and other goods — dispelling the idea that much of the aid would be wasted by recipients — while not reducing recipients’ willingness to work.

    • A 2019 study by GiveDirectly of its cash-transfer program in Kenya found positive spillovers even to those who didn’t receive money, with little effect on price inflation.

    The other side: “Cash can’t buy everything,” as Drake University economist Heath Henderson wrote this year. 

    The bottom line: Even if money isn’t a cure-all, when it comes to tackling poverty as quickly as possible, “it can be as simple as expanding cash,” says Nawar.

    Original article: https://www.axios.com/givedirectly-cash-aid-poverty-pandemic-5806c1e6-aaff-4b41-bc17-98514d4e2431.html

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  • Proposal to distribute a ‘COVID Dividend’ of £400 a month to everyone in the UK for one year

    A Resilience Universal Basic Income would guarantee economic security for every household in the UK as we recover from COVID-19


    By Patrick Brown

    The end of the £20 uplift to Universal Credit this week represents the biggest overnight cut to the basic rate of social security since the Second World War – at a time when the effects of the pandemic are still being felt.

    This, combined with the end of the furlough scheme, will plunge millions of families into poverty over the next few months. Politicians, activists and civil society leaders agree there is still an urgent need to provide economic support that protects everybody.

    Welcome as the furlough scheme and the uplift to Universal Credit were, their targeted design meant that many fell through the cracks, and the government spent much of last summer rushing through loans, grants and add-on schemes to catch those who didn’t qualify for one reason or another.


    A crisis that affects everyone needs a response that protects everyone.

    That’s why, at the UBI Lab Network, we’re proposing that the government put in place what we call a Resilience Universal Basic Income (UBI). This is a new and fully costed proposal that we’re proud to launch today in openDemocracy.

    We want to give every working-age adult (16-64) resident in the UK £400 a month for a year – no strings attached.

    We also want to give all children and pensioners £200 a month. This would be without any changes to existing benefits or the State Pension.

    Unlike the small mountain of paperwork generated by the furlough scheme and Universal Credit, receiving the payments (which we’re calling a COVID Dividend) would be straightforward. All you would have to do is show that you’re a permanent resident of the UK to claim your money. Everyone would receive the COVID Dividend, regardless of income, wealth or work.

    The Resilience UBI would initially last for a year, but it could be extended depending on the circumstances of the pandemic. In our full proposal paper, we’ve also outlined how it could be transitioned into a permanent Universal Basic Income for everyone.

    Our Resilience UBI would guarantee economic security for every household in the UK, and would give citizens the crucial spending power needed to revive our struggling communities and high streets. It would build up resilience, both in individual households and the economy as a whole, to protect against future shocks like COVID.


    The Resilience UBI is affordable. We estimate the overall cost would be £261bn over 12 months. This is around half what the UK spent onbailing out the banks after the 2008 financial crash, and a fraction of what the US government has put into their own temporary UBI – theStimulus Checks.

    Instead of tax rises, we would fund the Resilience UBI through People’s Quantitative Easing – government money creation, in other words – which would reinject some of the money that working families have lost during lockdown back into the economy.

    Quantitative Easing is how the government funded the bank bailout as well as most of the COVID support schemes, including furlough. The difference is that the money from those two interventions went to banks and big business – our Resilience UBI would give money directly to citizens and to communities.

    We’ve teamed up with PolicyEngine UK, which models the effect of proposed policy changes on the economy, to crunch the numbers. Its modelling of our Resilience UBI shows that overall poverty would fall by 80%, and child poverty by 85%. It also found that the lowest earners would be the biggest winners. It’s even created a tool so that you can see the effect the Resilience UBI would have on your own household.


    We’ve also considered the inflationary risk of our proposals. We argue that the one-year Resilience UBI would only have a transitory effect on inflation, whereas any full UBI in the future would have a minimal effect as it would significantly offset inflationary risk through additional taxation on the wealthiest.

    Politicians from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Alliance Party and the Green Party have welcomed our Resilience UBI proposal as an important contribution to the debate around ongoing economic support after the end of the furlough scheme.

    Scotland’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon said in May last year that Universal Basic Income was an idea “that’s time has come”, while Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham recently called for the introduction of the policy at the Labour Party conference. Most significantly, in Wales, first minister Mark Drakeford recently announced his government’s intention to launch a major pilot of UBI after a successful election campaign by the UBI Lab Network.

    Our fully costed Resilience UBI is an innovative response to an unprecedented crisis. The economic interventions the Conservative government has made in the past 12 months – unthinkable before 2008 – have shown that the government can act big to protect households and the economy. It’s just a matter of political will.

    A Resilience UBI would protect everybody, and would be the first step towards a society free of poverty and insecurity, and protected against future shocks like COVID. We can turn our patchy safety net into a safety floor that no one can fall below. If not now, then when?

    Original article: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/we-want-to-give-everyone-in-britain-400-a-month-no-strings-attached/

    The post Proposal to distribute a ‘COVID Dividend’ of £400 a month to everyone in the UK for one year appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Fumio Kishida Is Elected Prime Minister of Japan

    New leader seeks to stimulate economy by wealth distribution, including cash handouts to people hurt by the pandemic

    By Peter Landers

    TOKYO—Japan’s new prime minister, Fumio Kishida, called for more aggressive distribution of wealth to those with lower and middle incomes, including possible new cash handouts for people suffering during the pandemic.

    Mr. Kishida spoke at a news conference Monday hours after he was elected prime minister by Japan’s Parliament. The 64-year-old former foreign minister was elected head of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party on Sept. 29, assuring his elevation to prime minister.

    While he hasn’t proposed any sharp departures from the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Kishida has taken a more liberal tone, in the American sense of the word, on the economy. He says the world’s third-largest economy has a widening rich-poor gap that needs to be closed through distribution of wealth to those who are falling behind.

    “We need to create an environment where the fruits of growth are properly distributed,” he said at the news conference.

    Mr. Kishida said he would consider cash handouts to single mothers, workers without steady jobs and others suffering during Covid-19. Last year the government distributed nearly $1,000 to every resident. He also said his government would look at tax breaks for companies that use their cash stockpiles to raise workers’ salaries rather than only raising dividends.

    He has said that if lower-income people have more cash in their pockets, it will stimulate consumer spending. However, any push to limit corporate dividends could hurt the stock market, which rose sharply between 2012 and 2020 when Shinzo Abe was prime minister.

    The stimulus plans are likely to figure prominently in Mr. Kishida’s campaign this month to keep the Liberal Democratic Party’s majority in Parliament’s lower house, the more powerful of the legislature’s two chambers. Mr. Kishida said the lower-house election would take place Oct. 31.

    Japan’s economy has recovered slowly from the Covid-19 pandemic, as repeated states of emergency this year have held back consumer spending on travel, restaurants and entertainment. The country’s gross domestic product in the April-to-June quarter remained more than 3% below the peak it reached in the third quarter of 2019.

    Recently signs have improved, although they were too late to save the unpopular government of former Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, who said in early September that he would step down. The seven-day rolling average number of Covid-19 infections has fallen more than 90% from an August peak, allowing the government to lift a state of emergency last week. Shopping districts and restaurants were crowded over the weekend as voluntary curbs on businesses were eased.

    Sentiment among Japan’s large manufacturers improved to the highest level in nearly three years in the Bank of Japan’s quarterly survey released Friday, helped by the global economic recovery.

    Mr. Kishida has said he wants an economic stimulus valued at several hundred billion dollars to lift the economy back to normalcy. 

    “Kishida is keen to support the Japanese middle class by subsidizing housing and education expenses, which should lead to an increase in consumption,” said Naoya Oshikubo, an economist at Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Asset Management.

    The ruling party’s new policy chief is Sanae Takaichi, who ran an unexpectedly strong campaign for party leadership against Mr. Kishida with backing from former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. Ms. Takaichi has positioned herself as the heir to Mr. Abe’s pro-growth Abenomics policies and has said Japan can issue debt freely to finance its Covid-19 recovery and other priorities as long as inflation doesn’t exceed the Bank of Japan’s 2% target. Recently consumer prices have been roughly flat.

    Original article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fumio-kishida-is-elected-prime-minister-of-japan-11633323689

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    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • Only 11 Percent of Rental Aid Has Been Disbursed, Says US Treasury

    Activists hold a protest against evictions near City Hall on August 11, 2021, in New York City.

    As the White House prepares for a U.S. Supreme Court order that could invalidate the new federal eviction moratorium, data released Wednesday revealed that state and local governments have disbursed just 11% of the funds that Congress allocated to help pay off debts accrued by renters during the Covid-19 pandemic.

    According to the U.S. Treasury Department, which oversees the Emergency Rental Assistance Program, only $1.7 billion was distributed in July. The New York Times reported that last month’s amount “was a modest increase from the prior month, bringing the total aid disbursed thus far to about $5.1 billion.” That’s a small fraction of the $46.5 billion that Congress appropriated for rental assistance in two coronavirus relief packages passed in the last year.

    “This is unacceptable,” Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-N.Y.) said in response to the new figures. “We fought to extend the eviction moratorium to give states a chance to distribute these funds, but time is of the essence.”

    Just weeks ago, a group of progressive lawmakers led by Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) held overnight rallies outside the Capitol to pressure President Joe Biden to extend the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s nationwide eviction moratorium. While Biden let the previous CDC order lapse on July 31, sustained direct action pushed his administration to implement on August 3 a new, more limited 60-day ban on evictions to give state and local governments more time to distribute rent relief.

    Jones said Wednesday that “states… must immediately get these funds to renters with the urgency this crisis demands.”

    The Times noted that the new data came as the Biden administration “mapped out policy contingencies if the Supreme Court strikes down the moratorium, which is the administration’s principal safeguard for hundreds of thousands of low-income and working class tenants hit hardest by the pandemic.” The White House anticipates a decision as soon as this week.

    According to the Times, Treasury Department and White House officials said during a Tuesday night conference call that while some progress has been made this month, states are delivering rental aid at such a slow pace that an eviction surge is likely even if the high court allows the new ban to continue until its scheduled October 2 expiration date.

    The newspaper added:

    On Wednesday, the Treasury Department rolled out a slate of incremental changes intended to pressure states to move more quickly. But administration officials continue to blame the program’s struggles on local officials, many of whom are reluctant to take advantage of the program’s new fast-track application process, which allows tenants to self-certify their financial information.

    In recent weeks, local officials have complained that moving too fast on aid applications could lead to errors, fraud, and audits; the White House has countered by telling them those risks are insignificant compared with a wave of evictions hitting tenants who did not get their aid quickly enough to keep a roof over their heads.

    Journalist Brian Goldstone argued that the unwillingness of local agencies to expedite the allocation of funds, including by giving money directly to renters, means that “they trust landlords — but not tenants — to tell the truth.”

    The Times noted that many landlords “have rejected the federal aid, arguing that evicting nonpaying tenants is not only their right but the most effective way of ensuring their revenue is not interrupted in the future.”

    Matt Ford of The New Republic called the situation “a colossal failure of governance.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Canadian Relief Agency Refused Emergency Medical Support Donation for Palestine

    A person holds up a sign reading "free Palestine" during a protest

    Last June, with the spectre of a COVID catastrophe looming over Palestinians, Canada’s largest private relief agency refused a $165,000 donation for emergency medical support in the Occupied Territories.

    The rejected funds were the product of a months-long fundraising effort by the Canadian Palestinian Organizations Coalition (CPOC) and the CJPME Foundation: an independent charity launched by my human rights education and advocacy organization Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), which is dedicated to “enabling Canadians of all backgrounds to promote justice, development and peace in the Middle East” in accordance with international law.

    The groups approached World Vision Canada (WVC) about the donation last April, and were told by the director of Fragile and Humanitarian Programs that the relief agency was “definitely open” to discussing the “possibility of a partnership.”

    Yet after two months of an initially encouraging back-and-forth, WVC announced that it would not be accepting the grant — even though World Vision staff on the ground in Palestine had earlier affirmed that “there is scope for more assistance in the health sector.”

    “Assistance” is desperately necessitated, in fact, by the evisceration of the Palestinian health sector under Israel’s occupation policies and periodic military assaults, which have left hospital beds, ventilators, vital medicines, and access to clean water and electricity in perilously short supply.

    In a subsequent meeting in October with the rejected donors, WVC CEO Michael Messenger explained that there was a previously unannounced organizational “freeze” on all external grants for the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza: an extraordinary condition, which he admitted applies exclusively to Palestine.

    The decision to refuse the donation was not determined by general World Vision International policy, but at the discretion of the Canadian office. According to a recording of the meeting, Messenger acknowledged that the decision “came right up to [his] desk” and was made “on the fly,” impelled by a desire to “take a risk-averse approach” and “keep a lower profile during this time.”

    According to Messenger, WVC implemented the freeze due to Israel’s ongoing prosecution of former World Vision Gaza Operations Manager Mohammad El Halabi, further compounding the injustice of the prosecution by depriving Palestinians collectively of aid.

    Israeli security services have accused El Halabi of funnelling seemingly impossible sums of money from World Vision to Hamas, amounting to more than twice the charity’s operating budget in Palestine for the previous 10 years.

    Independent audits by World Vision International, the Australian and German governments, and the U.S. Agency for International Development all failed to find any evidence of financial impropriety on El Halabi’s part. When questioned about the improbable math behind the case, an Israeli government spokesperson responded that the exact numbers are “not really relevant.”

    Also irrelevant in Israel’s eyes, apparently, are basic due process guarantees for the accused, who has been subjected to one of the longest security trials of a Palestinian in Israeli history — 165 hearings so far over more than five years. El Halabi was tortured and detained incommunicado without access to a lawyer for 50 days, his lawyer has been denied access to key pieces of the prosecution’s “evidence,” and defence witnesses from Gaza have been barred entry into Israel for testifying.

    Undeterred by the paucity of the evidence, the judge presiding over the trial advised El Halabi that he should just plead guilty since there is “little chance” he will not be convicted — a Kafkaesque demand to which he has refused to acquiesce.

    Following El Halabi’s indictment, Israel’s Foreign Ministry initiated a campaign to “spread the news among liberal and religious groups who support World Vision,” and discredit the humanitarian aid sector in Gaza as a whole. The fires of this witch-hunt have long been stoked by Israel advocacy organizations Shurat HaDin (the Israel Law Centre) and NGO Monitor — contributions to both of which continue to flow freely, lubricated by charitable tax status in Canada and the U.S.

    Despite the pressure exerted by the El Halabi trial, other World Vision branches — specifically World Vision Germany — have continued to accept grants for Palestine, according to Messenger himself.

    Indeed, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Financial Tracking Service has recorded four significant grants to World Vision globally for its work in the Occupied Territories since the onset of the trial in 2016. Two of them — $500,000 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2019, and $588,928 from the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection Department in 2020 — are marked as new commitments.

    In 2020, World Vision’s field office for the West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza reported spending over $2 million to support West Bank schools, including $981,927 for COVID response: the precise need which the $165,000 raised by the CJPME Foundation and CPOC was intended to fulfill.

    Just days after Messenger insisted there was a “freeze” on Palestine, World Vision Canada itself finalized arrangements with ultramarathoner Russell Lavis for a fundraiser to “support [them] in their work to protect in West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem,” which ultimately raised almost $10,000. This suggests that the supposedly general “freeze” may have been a more targeted chill against Palestine solidarity and advocacy organizations.

    When asked about the apparent discrepancy, WVC responded that the restriction was not in fact a blanket one, as originally communicated, but only covered “large organizational grants in the region.”

    “For two months, we met inexplicable delays, were falsely told that ‘administrative steps’ had to be conducted, and were seemingly falsely told that a ‘freeze’ on external grants for the [Occupied Palestinian Territories] was in place,” the CJPME Foundation and CPOC wrote in a complaint to Cooperation Canada, an umbrella group of international development and humanitarian organizations including World Vision Canada. “While no charity is obliged to accept all grants, WVC has failed to do so in a way which is clear, consistent and justifiable.”

    The complaint outlined several apparent breaches of the Code of Ethics to which all Cooperation Canada members are required to adhere — including lack of transparency with donors, lack of accountability to on-the-ground partners in Palestine and failure to act with fairness.

    WVC’s behaviour also possibly violated the four internationally recognized principles of humanitarianism: impartiality (non-discrimination on the basis of nationality, race and religion); neutrality (between opposing parties in a conflict); independence (from political, economic and military objectives); and humanity (to relieve human suffering wherever it is found).

    Yet after discussing with WVC, Cooperation Canada informed the complainants that it “will not be pursuing this topic further,” dismissing it as a matter of “miscommunications” and “misunderstandings.”

    In a prior meeting with the CJPME Foundation and CPOC, Cooperation Canada CEO Nicolas Moyer even proposed that by declining the donation from Palestinian and Palestine-solidarity organizations, WVC may have upheld rather than compromised its neutrality and impartiality.

    WVC’s decision may have been “a way to demonstrate in fact neutrality and impartiality, by taking away the risk of being associated to other influencers,” Moyer said, according to a recording of the meeting. “Whether they passed judgement on CJPME, I don’t know…. But does that actually mean they didn’t live up to impartiality and neutrality principles? It may mean the reverse.”

    Perversely, support for Palestinians’ basic rights under international law is cast as a sign of partiality rather than impartiality. “Neutrality” is deployed, yet again, as a shield for the status quo — one in which political solidarity with Palestinians is systemically repressed.

    In Canada, as across North America and Europe, lawyers, academics, trade unions, teachers, students, journalists, artists and human rights organizations — including CJPME — have been smeared, physically attacked, threatened with professional disciplinary measures and censored for advocating for justice for Palestinians: the “Palestine exception” to free speech.

    Last year, the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Law rescinded a job offer to international human rights scholar Valentina Azarova after a sitting judge complained about her research on Israel/Palestine; and in May, the Canadian Judicial Council refused to remove the judge involved for bias: the “Palestine exception” in justice.

    As the WVC case illustrates, there is also a “Palestine exception” in aid, produced and perpetuated by multiple layers of oppression.

    First is Israel’s occupation — which creates the need for aid to Palestinians in the first place. The occupation sucks billions of dollars from the Palestinian economy each year, as documented by the UN Conference on Trade and Development, rendering 50 percent of Palestinians dependent on aid. Meanwhile, Israel has abdicated its legal responsibility as an occupying power under the Geneva Conventions to protect the welfare of the occupied. For instance, during the pandemic, Israel has widely vaccinated its own population but refused to provide vaccines for Palestinians: a state of “medical apartheid” further intensified by Israeli forces’ destruction of hospitals and the only COVID testing lab in Gaza in May.

    Second is the demonization and securitization of the humanitarian sector that steps in to fill the void — emblematized by Israel’s Potemkin trial of El Halabi for terrorism, and general targeting of humanitarian and human rights workers as “terrorists in suits.”

    Third is the co-optation of international donors into propping up the occupation — whether by providing better paving for apartheid roads, or reinforcing Israel’s roadblocks to support for Palestinians. Ultimately, aid is not only a “lifeline” for Palestinians — which Israel boasts of generously permitting — but also a cash pipeline for Israel: 78 percent of international funding to Palestine ends up back in the Israeli economy, covering at least 18 percent of the costs of the occupation.

    Fourth is the skewed regulation of charities in countries like Canada and the U.S. — so that while donations to Palestinians have been prevented, or even punished as “terrorism,” tax-deductible contributions to organizations bolstering the occupation (Shurat HaDin, NGO Monitor and others) are effectively subsidized by the state.

    And fifth is the pervasive racism and dehumanization against Palestinians — which sustains and normalizes this pathological situation.

    In the words of critical geographer and development scholar Omar Jabary Salamanca, aid is used to “lubricate the prison-door hinges of settler occupation,” while efforts to dismantle the prison continue to be harshly suppressed.

    Disclosure: Azeezah Kanji is on the board of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, but was not involved in the events described in this article.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Opinion: The pandemic proved basic income is the answer to Pope Francis’ call to build back better

    By: KEVIN CLARKE

    In the early months of the COVID-19 crisis, more than 1,200 economists from around the world urged governments in an open letter to deploy an emergency universal basic income (UBI), a weekly or monthly no-strings-attached, government-funded family payout to counter what appeared to be an impending economic catastrophe. The economists were especially concerned about societies with large informal-sector workforces where “beyond earnings, there is next to no safety net.” As lockdowns were initiated and national economies seized up, many governments indeed turned to a UBI or UBI-like strategies to keep food on the table and people in their homes.

    The United States experimented with a number of UBI-adjacent initiatives as it grappled with its economic shutdown. Unemployment benefits were extended and fattened, and the Paycheck Protection Program allowed idled workers to stay on company payrolls for months while they waited for the green light to return to work. The expanded child tax credit and three rounds of “stimulus” checks kept families and, not coincidentally, the economy afloat as the crisis wore on.

    This emergency UBI experiment has passed or exceeded expectations.

    Many states will remain susceptible to the pandemic, and new hot spots will likely emerge through 2022. But assuming the pandemic is truly cycling down, what is the likelihood that these UBI experiments will translate into long-lasting social welfare policy shifts? In Spain, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, a dialogue has begun that could see some form of UBI become permanent, enhancing or even replacing current antipoverty arsenals. In the United States politicians like Bernie Sanders and New York mayoral hopeful Andrew Yang have been pressing hard for the establishment of a true UBI.

    Its many critics worry that a UBI disincentivizes work and rewards indolence. They point to recent rehiring difficulties during the pandemic recovery as proof that overcompensated unemployed are opting to laze at home rather than drone back into the U.S. workforce. Of course that criticism ignores the many workers who remain at home because of child care burdens created by the crisis or the reluctance of many employers to offer better return-to-work wages or benefits that might pull COVID-idled workers back to work.

    But what might really blow the minds of the UBI skeptics is the fact that their criticism may be completely valid and, gasp, that would be perfectly OK.

    Economic security created by COVID-connected assistance may indeed be encouraging some heads of households and working couples to stay home to care for their kids while they wait for better economic options. But that is not a bug in a morally and economically sound UBI system—it’s a feature.

    In fact it represents one of the more compelling aspects of the whole enterprise. Folks living under a UBI umbrella should be able to rely on this minimum family support while they weigh their options and seek new opportunities, whether that means going back to school or pursuing industrial retraining. They may even use the UBI as a buffer that allows one partner to stay at home with the kids.

    And that is not a bad thing. It will mean mentally and physically healthier families and better trained or professionalized workers able to compete globally and command higher wages. It will mean stability previously unknown to 30 to 40 percent of U.S. households struggling with economic insecurity. It may just be the opening to a more humane economy—one that serves people before profit—that the church has been imploring since the dawn of the industrial age.

    So let’s not snap defeat out of the jaws of this economic and humanitarian victory. This emergency UBI experiment has passed or exceeded expectations. In the spirit of Pope Francis’ appeal to build back a better world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 calamity, let’s keep it.

    The post Opinion: The pandemic proved basic income is the answer to Pope Francis’ call to build back better appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • COVID Relief Packages Dramatically Reduced Poverty. They Should Be Permanent.

    New Yorkers wait in line to receive items from a food pantry on July 30, 2021, in the Bronx borough of New York City.

    Last week, the Urban Institute released stunning data on how the huge infusion of government assistance to counter the economic effects of the pandemic had reduced poverty in the U.S. The researchers found that because of enhanced unemployment benefits, rent assistance, eviction moratoriums, increased access to food stamps, tax credits and stimulus checks paid directly to families, the U.S. poverty rate (a conservative, and at times inadequate, estimate of poverty, but one used by poverty scholars for generations) had plummeted to a projected 7.7 percent for 2021. This contrasts with an official poverty rate, calculated by the U.S. Census, of 10.5 percent in 2019; and an Urban Institute estimate that by the end of 2020, the poverty rate had declined to 9.5 percent, largely because of federal and state government interventions to support the income of huge numbers of Americans. That trend continued into 2021: The Urban Institute researchers concluded that child poverty has now declined to 5.6 percent, a far lower number than ever previously recorded in the U.S.

    On one level, the data was entirely counterintuitive. After all, as the COVID crisis has raged the past 18 months, we have witnessed Great Depression-era level spikes in unemployment and unprecedented increases in housing and food insecurity. On the other hand, it oughtn’t to have been entirely surprising, because in 2020 and 2021, Congress, despite its general dysfunction, managed to pass into law several pandemic relief packages worth trillions of dollars — and much of that money ended up flowing, often at speed, to households around the country.

    The lesson is clear: Ambitious, outside-the-box government programs and investments can be extraordinarily effective in helping vulnerable Americans escape poverty. The Urban Institute’s research concludes that absent these interventions, the poverty rate at the end of 2020 would have been above 20 percent of the population.

    There’s a historical precedent for big-thinking and big-spending government programs successfully driving down the poverty rate: At the height of the “war on poverty,” in the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States also began posting huge drops in the number of residents living in poverty — though at a slower pace than occurred in 2020 and 2021.

    From 1964 to 1973, from the year Lyndon Johnson began putting in place the building blocks of his anti-poverty programs to the year that Richard Nixon began shifting the emphasis away from these programs and toward more punitive social policies such as the “war on crime” and the “war on drugs,” poverty in the U.S. declined by 42 percent.

    But, as political priorities shifted, and as the moral language around poverty morphed from the LBJ-era notions of poverty being a societal problem to the Reagan-era notions of poverty being the fault of poor people’s behavior and choices, the needed investments in social infrastructure began to wane. From the 1970s on, for most groups of Americans, the poverty rate either plateaued or increased. The numbers waxed and waned somewhat, but by and large, for most of the past half-century, with the exception of dips in 2000 and in 2018-19 triggered by historically low levels of unemployment, between 12 and 15 percent of Americans in any given year have lived in poverty — with a shockingly large number of those living in what economists term “deep poverty,” where their incomes only take them to (at most) half of the poverty threshold, and where significant physical and mental health impacts are most likely to occur.

    Of course, poverty has never been distributed evenly. Thanks to this country’s foundations in slavery and colonialism and its ongoing practices of systemic oppression, African American, Indigenous and Latino communities have long had far higher poverty rates than whites. And until the most recent anti-poverty interventions, young people, especially those living in single-parent households, were more likely to live in poverty than were older Americans.

    In fact, during these decades, for the elderly — who benefited from the creation of Medicare and a series of other targeted efforts — poverty plummeted, and continued to decline even after the broader war on poverty ended. At the start of LBJ’s anti-poverty efforts, more than one in four seniors lived below the poverty line. A half-century later, with Medicare, Supplemental Security Income and other benefits having been cemented into the social compact, fewer than 1 in 10 seniors were in similar straits.

    Of course, some of this data should be taken with a grain of salt: For decades, experts have critiqued the government’s definition of poverty, and the threshold that it uses to determine whether individuals and families are income-insecure as failing to fully measure economic hardship. Most poverty measures used by the federal government don’t, for example, fully take into account the high cost of housing in states such as California or New York; nor do they fully recognize that things such as affordable broadband access are now necessities of life rather than luxuries. Certainly, during the Trump era, falling official rates of poverty masked deepening fissures of inequality and deepening financial straits faced by those at the bottom of the economic pyramid.

    When the government invests in anti-poverty programs, across-the-board measures of poverty show that these programs can work to improve the financial condition of millions of Americans. Yet, despite that, too often those programs fail to sustain popular support over the long-term.

    In fact, historically, across-the-board anti-poverty programs have only ever attracted lukewarm political support from U.S. leaders. Poverty embarrasses those in power. They don’t like to talk about it or admit its durability. In the 1960s, the sociologist Michael Harrington wrote of a poverty that was rendered invisible by the broader affluence that hemmed it in. As a society, we have, over the decades, been remarkably willing to sweep our poverty crisis under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist.

    Harrington’s book, The Other America, helped trigger a political and cultural awakening around poverty. It helped open eyes and create the conditions in which it was possible to put in place interventions such as Medicare and Medicaid, an expansion of food stamps, free and reduced school meals, increased job training and housing programs in poor neighborhoods, and so on. But, over time, the public’s appetite for these programs — and the costs of maintaining them — waned, and poverty rates began creeping up again.

    Today, in 2021, the country has a huge opportunity. Out of the pandemic, remarkably creative economic and political thinking has emerged about how to reduce poverty. Federally, one-year child tax credits are now in place that will massively reduce child poverty this year. At a state level, states like California are implementing universal pre-K education. Ideas around creating guaranteed income programs are no longer dismissed as being utopian or un-implementable. A dramatic expansion of unemployment benefits was shown not only to be possible, but to be remarkably effective at keeping unemployed people afloat economically.

    Yet all of these changes are as fragile as were so many of the programs of LBJ’s war on poverty. Already, Republican states have dismantled their expanded unemployment benefits. Already, Congress and President Biden have allowed the federal eviction moratorium to sunset — despite millions still struggling to pay their rent. Already, there is a political battle underway about whether or not to continue the child tax credits beyond this current year.

    Take these tools away, and poverty could all too easily boomerang back up to pre-pandemic levels within months. That would be a tragedy of historic proportions — and an entirely avoidable one at that.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Monthly unconditional cash program in Chelsea has cut food insecurity in half

    Across the country, an unprecedented combination of stimulus checks and tax credits is helping families to weather the longstanding impacts of the Covid-19 crisis.

    By: Brigid Boyd

    Across the country, an unprecedented combination of stimulus checks and tax credits is helping families to weather the longstanding impacts of the Covid-19 crisis. Families are using these funds, which are being deposited directly into their bank accounts, to pay rent, utilities, medical bills, and to go to grocery stores instead of food pantries.

    Locally, the City of Chelsea is giving its most vulnerable residents another form of “no strings attached” assistance.

    Through a partnership led by the Shah Family Foundation, United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley, and Massachusetts General Hospital, 2,000 families are receiving $200–$400 per month in the Chelsea Eats “guaranteed income” pilot to help pay for their essential needs.

    The heart of both efforts is the same – in the context of crisis, both are addressing the essential needs of vulnerable people not typically served by our social safety net and doing so in ways that keep funds spent in the local economy where they will benefit small businesses.

    “SOMETHING HAD TO CHANGE”

    Even before the pandemic, more than 60% of Chelsea residents were food insecure and nearly 1 in 5 were living in poverty. At the onset of the crisis in March 2020, the City of Chelsea began distributing 800-900 pounds of food per day to 10,000 residents.

    But as he looked out at the lines for food and ahead to the cold winter months, Chelsea City Manager Tom Ambrosino knew something had to change.

    “This was an undignified way for people to meet their needs,” Ambrosino said. “To see lines wrapped around the building, to see frail, elderly people waiting outside just to be handed a heavy box of food to carry home, we thought, there has to be a more humane way to meet this need.”

    The Shah Foundation, City of Chelsea, United Way and Massachusetts General Hospital seeded Chelsea Eats.

    More than 3,600 eligible Chelsea residents applied for the program, and 2,000 were selected by lottery to receive a pre-paid debit card with $200-$400 per month.

    The Shah Foundation also partnered with Jeff Liebman of the Harvard Kennedy School to conduct the research and evaluation of the project.

    CAN CASH ASSISTANCE REDUCE POVERTY AND IMPROVE FOOD INSECURITY?

    The short answer is yes.

    During a recent CommonWealth Town Hall co-hosted by United Way, the Cambridge Community Foundation and the Shah Family Foundation and moderated by CommonWealth Editor Bruce Mohl, Liebman shared his research and findings to date:

    • In September 2020, 89% of those participating in Chelsea Eats reported they had lost their job or had their hours reduced.
    • Over 50 percent of the Chelsea Eats participants reported sometimes or often not having enough food to eat, compared to 7 percent statewide.

    “The job loss carried right over into food insecurity, Liebman said. “I have never seen a US population before with this level of food insecurity.”

    • When the participants were surveyed again in December 2020, the number of residents who reported sometimes or often not having enough to eat dropped from over 50 percent to 26 percent.
    • The transactions were also reviewed as part of the research and evaluation. Overall, more than 75 percent of the money was spent on food; more than half of that was spent locally in Chelsea-based markets, while another 17% in neighboring communities of Revere and Everett.

    “The issue isn’t that people don’t know how to manage money, the issue is that they do not have money to manage,” said Michael Tubbs, founder of Mayors for Guaranteed Income.

    CAN $400 A MONTH CHANGE LIVES?

    Sarah Arnan works at GreenRoots, one of United Way’s partners in Chelsea. Arnan helped to identify eligible families to participate in Chelsea Eats, and says giving people cash can change lives.

    “It is empowering,” Arnan said. “It is an investment in community members, in trust and in agency. It is saying to them that we trust you are making the right decisions for you and your family. We know that you ultimately know what is best for yourselves.”

    “People don’t realize how far people in need can make $400 a month stretch,” added Bob Giannino, President and CEO at United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley. “It can be a lifeline, and lifesaving, to help meet needs that are unexpected.”

    Liebman will continue his research throughout the summer to determine whether residents who receive the food debit card end up better off financially than those who do not over the course of the pilot. If yes, the study will also look to quantify by how much – and in what ways – the card recipients are better off than the control group of non-recipients.

    The study will also capture how residents’ lives are impacted by the additional money over time. It will focus on measuring outcomes in food access; nutrition, saving; spending behavior, impact on work (flexibility to choose a safer job, better hours, better commute), debt, family support, and increased time with children.

    “IT’S A SIMPLE CONCEPT.”

    “The way we have been administering public assistance for 50 years since we launched the War on Poverty is not working,” said United Way’s Giannino. “We’ve lost the war, and now it is time to rethink how the safety net and benefits are deployed.”

    United Way is particularly committed to this work because it builds on the deep involvement United Way has led with the City of Chelsea and community-based organizations since last April through the One Chelsea Fund.  To date, the One Chelsea Fund has raised more than $1.3 million and has provided financial assistance to more than 4,100 households in Chelsea.

    The City of Cambridge also recently announced it will pilot a guaranteed income program in partnership with the Cambridge Community Foundation for 120 single caregivers beginning in August.

    “Our mission is to amass a body of evidence to demonstrate that guaranteed income is the best investment you can make in human potential,” said Cambridge Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui. “Poverty is a policy failure, not a personal failure.”

    Covid-19 has illuminated and widened existing cracks in our human services safety net and education system like no other point in time in our history. But it is also a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine how we meet the needs of our most vulnerable residents and empower our communities to emerge stronger, equitable and more prepared for the future.

    “This is one of those moments, one of those opportunities,” said Giannino.

    “What’s so appealing about guaranteed income is that it is not a patchwork of programs wrapped in bureaucracy, each tailored to meet a specific need with government restrictions,” said Jill Shah, President at the Shah Family Foundation.

    “It’s a simple concept,” Shah added. “It is administered with virtually no red tape or administrative costs. It gets money directly to people who need it most and empowers them to spend it in ways that best meet their needs. It also may be the single most effective way to stimulate local economies at a time when that is more important than ever.”

    Learn more by watching the full CommonWealth Town Hall: Does Giving People Money Make for Good Policy? Assessing the Impact of Guaranteed Income, cohosted by United Way, or read Commonwealth Magazine’s coverage of the event.

    The post Monthly unconditional cash program in Chelsea has cut food insecurity in half appeared first on Basic Income Today.

    This post was originally published on Basic Income Today.

  • One Company Received the Maximum Possible PPP Loan, Then Moved Jobs to Mexico

    Many businesses exploited loopholes and rule changes to lay off employees despite receiving funds to keep them employed.

    Late last summer, after churning along through the pandemic with only a two-week pause, managers at FreightCar America called hundreds of workers into the break area at the company’s factory near Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to tell them that the plant was closing for good.

    For some employees, the news wasn’t a shock: They’d been hearing rumors that management would move the work elsewhere for years. The timing, however, seemed odd. Only a few months earlier, the publicly traded company had received a $10 million Paycheck Protection Program Loan — the maximum amount available under a pandemic relief program designed to keep workers employed. Some had believed the funds would keep the doors open for a little while longer.

    Nevertheless, the plant’s managers announced that all production would move to FreightCar’s new facility in Mexico, which meant most of the assembled workers would lose their jobs.

    Jim Meyer, FreightCar America’s CEO, told ProPublica in an email that he had not intended to shutter the plant when he received the PPP money, and that it had allowed the company to keep workers on the job through most of 2020 despite a sharp dropoff in new orders.

    Robert Bulman, however, thinks the $10 million just helped FreightCar’s Shoals plant keep producing while company officials got ready to shut it down.

    “When the Mexican plant opened, we were told at the beginning they would just be helping Shoals and making parts for the trains,” said Bulman, who worked at the Alabama plant for seven years before getting laid off last year. “But the whole time, it was a setup, we were gone.”

    FreightCar America isn’t the only large company to have taken out a multimillion-dollar Paycheck Protection Program loan and then laid off a substantial chunk of its workforce. An analysis of applications for trade adjustment assistance, which the federal government provides to workers whose jobs have disappeared due to imports, shows that at least half a dozen companies that applied for more than a million dollars apiece in PPP loans terminated more than 50 workers in 2020 after their aid was approved.

    To be clear, the companies may have complied with program rules, which put a premium on getting money out fast. The regulations changed frequently in the months after the Congress established the PPP as part of the CARES Act in March 2020, and the law was later amended to allow more of the money to be used for non-payroll expenses. The law also contained many exemptions that stretched the definition of what qualifies as a small business.

    A paper mill in northeast Washington state called Ponderay Newsprint, for example, went bankrupt and laid off 150 workers, two months after being approved for a $3.46 million loan. Its bankruptcy trustee John Munding said the money was used to pay workers and the government forgave the loan, while the company’s assets were acquired by a private equity firm.

    A Nebraska aircraft parts manufacturer called Royal Engineered Composites was approved for $2.74 million in April 2020 in order to support 250 jobs, but laid off 99 workers by mid-May. The company declined to comment.

    Canadian-owned Supreme Steel took $1.69 million in May 2020 for its plant in Portland, Oregon, which it closed five months later, terminating 112 employees. Spokesperson Rhandi Berndt said that “the closure was the result of market forces” and declined to answer further questions.

    In order for PPP loans to be forgiven, the federal Small Business Administration initially required borrowers to spend 75% of the funds on payroll over eight weeks. Since the maximum PPP loan amount was for 2.5 times companies’ average monthly payroll in 2019, that should have guaranteed that wages and hours could be maintained, as required by the CARES Act.

    In the case of FreightCar and some other borrowers, the original eight-week “covered period” of the PPP loan passed before layoffs occurred, allowing the companies to have their loans fully forgiven. But the other cases may have easily qualified as well, because Congress changed the rules.

    Last June, after businesses protested that they couldn’t spend their PPP money fast enough in a stalled economy, the legislation was amended to require only that 60% of a loan go toward workers’ pay, and the covered period was extended to 24 weeks. Since borrowers had to spend less of the loan on payroll over a longer period to keep the money, they had wide leeway to let people go as they saw fit.

    “It wouldn’t be difficult to lay off 50% of your workforce and still get full forgiveness,” said Eric Kodesch, an attorney at Lane Powell who has helped many clients with their PPP applications.

    The SBA has not publicly released data on forgiveness of specific loans, but aggregate statistics show that so far, out of all applications processed, more than 99% of the total dollar value has been forgiven. The SBA declined to comment on individual borrowers or identify loans that have been forgiven.

    There’s another reason why a casual reader of the CARES Act might think companies would not qualify for PPP money: Many are actually very large businesses.

    In general, the CARES Act set an upper size limit of 500 employees. With a few exceptions, the law required SBA to count all “affiliate” companies toward that total. That would include companies owned by private equity firms as well as subsidiaries contained within holding companies. It exempted hotels, restaurants and franchises, but no other industries. (That’s why Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steak House qualified for loans, though each returned the money after a barrage of negative press coverage.)

    However, a number of program nuances allowed large companies to obtain PPP loans.

    FreightCar laid off 550 people with the Shoals plant shutdown, according to a notice filed with the state of Alabama. Along with its headquarters employees, that alone would exceed the PPP’s ostensible 500-employee cap. But FreightCar availed itself of a loophole baked into the PPP. The SBA’s alternative size standards, a complex set of industry-by-industry thresholds that have been debated for decades, allowed it to qualify with up to 1,500 workers.

    Originally, the SBA allowed foreign-owned applicants to count only their U.S.-based employees under the 500-person cap. That guidance changed last May, requiring foreign-owned applicants to count their entire global workforce. But plenty of companies had already gotten PPP loans, and were allowed to keep them.

    For example, Ledvance LLC, a Chinese-owned global lightbulb manufacturer operating in the U.S. under the brand name Sylvania, was approved for a $9.36 million PPP loan in April 2020. Then, between May and July, it laid off 50 people while closing down a distribution center near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Ledvance spokesperson Glen Gracia said in an email that the layoffs were “unrelated to the pandemic and in full compliance with LEDVANCE’s participation in the Paycheck Protection Program.”

    Then there’s Chick Master Incubator Company, which took $1.34 million in April 2020. In June, its corporate parent — a Zurich-based private office that invests the fortune of a long-established industrialist family — announced it would combine Chick Master with its other hatchery holdings and close the plant, laying off 68 people in Medina, Ohio, by year’s end. Chick Master didn’t reply to a request for comment.

    One type of applicant, however, still likely should not have qualified: companies controlled by private equity firms whose total holdings exceed the SBA’s size standard for the borrowers’ specific industries. Cadence Aerospace, a supplier of aerospace and defense parts that itself has bought three companies in the last three years, is majority-owned by Arlington Capital, a private equity firm managing billions of dollars. Cadence was approved for a $10 million PPP loan in April 2020, and later that month laid off 72 people at its Giddens Industries subsidiary in Washington state, according to a notice filed with the state. Arlington Capital did not respond to a request for comment.

    The Shoals plant was the last remaining U.S. manufacturing facility for FreightCar, a 120-year-old company headquartered in Chicago that had been shrinking its U.S. footprint for years. In 2008, it shuttered its plant in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In 2017, it shut down its factory in Danville, Illinois. In 2019, it closed its plant in Roanoke, Virginia and announced it would open a new facility under a joint venture in Castaños, Mexico. When executives informed investors in September that the Shoals facility would also close and manufacturing would shift to Mexico, they projected $25 million in overall savings, including a 60% reduction in labor costs.

    “Our manufacturing transformation is now largely complete, and we have taken control of our own destiny,” Meyer said on an earnings call in March. “We have dramatically repositioned our competitive profile and in so doing created a new company, one that is able to win.”

    In 2013, the future looked different. When the Shoals plant opened, it offered about $12 an hour to start and a chance at advancement. One worker, who asked not to be named in order to protect her future employment prospects, left a tile-making job to become a welder, constructing a variety of rail cars, from hoppers to gondolas. Soon, she moved up to air brake tester, sliding underneath the massive steel vehicles to fix pipes.

    “I went to FreightCar to retire,” said the worker. “I wasn’t planning on leaving when I got there.”

    In the following years, safety, pay and management concerns led to a union drive. During the campaign, anti-union employees circulated flyers warning that the plant would shut down if workers voted to organize, and in 2018 they voted decisively against it.

    As it turned out, the Shoals facility wouldn’t last long anyway.

    Leading up to 2020, FreightCar touted the Shoals plant’s competitiveness. A marketing video showed production lines run by industrial robots and skilled workers. “This is the largest, newest, most purpose-built factory in North America,” boasted Meyer. “A modern, state-of-the-art factory in every sense of the word.”

    But the company was still losing money, to the tune of $75.2 million in 2019. When the pandemic further slowed down orders, executives started talking up the new facility in Mexico instead.

    “The Mexico labor rate is approximately 20% of that in the U.S.,” Meyer said on an earnings call in August 2020. “And the new plant provides other sources of savings beyond just labor.”

    Also on the August earnings call, executives explained that loan proceeds had made up for some of the cost of the company’s move to Mexico. Chris Eppel, then the company’s chief financial officer, said that the money also “partially offset” operating losses and inventory purchases. Meyer still got his $500,000 base salary in 2020, plus stock options worth nearly that and a $1 million bonus for securing a $40 million loan from a private investment company.

    FreightCar did not take out a second-draw PPP loan; updated rules excluded publicly traded companies.

    After the plant closure announcement, the air brake tester found a job making dashboards and bumpers for Toyota. It takes three times as long for her to get to her new job as the 20-minute drive she had to FreightCar, and she’s paid six dollars less per hour. Although FreightCar gave employees a few thousand dollars in severance payments, she said all of hers went towards bills.

    “It’s like starting all over again,” she said. “If they did right by us like they did their supervisors, maybe we’d be in more decent shape than what we’re in now.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Third Round of COVID Checks Led to Historic Monthly Rise in Household Income

    Boyer's cashier Kathryn Laudermilch bags a customers groceries at the Boyer's Food Markets grocery store in Womelsdorf, Pennsylvania, on April 8, 2021.

    The third round of coronavirus relief checks, which have been sent to 159 million households so far, were directly linked to an historic rise in household income, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal.

    Household income rose 21.1% in March after President Joe Biden signed the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package into law, following months of stonewalling by Republicans, who spent much of 2020 claiming that additional aid to help families struggling to pay for housing and other necessities was unaffordable.

    The immediate rise in household income from the previous month represented the largest increase since 1959, the Journal reported, citing data from the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis.

    “This is what happens when you opt for investing in working people over trickle-down economics,” said the grassroots organization Tax March.

    The report follows two studies conducted last year after the first round of relief checks were shown to markedly alleviate poverty — illustrating the fact that “poverty is a policy choice,” according to advocacy group People for Bernie.

    The new data regarding the latest round of checks shows “the fiscal stimulus was a roaring success,” tweeted CNBC reporter Carl Quintanilla.

    Households were promptly able to save significantly more money following the release of the checks, with the rate of personal savings increasing from 13.9% in February to 27.6% in March, according to the Journal.

    Spending rates also saw the largest month-to-month increase since last summer, rising by 4.2%.

    “Stimulus checks work,” tweeted Baltimore attorney Katelynn Brennan.

    As NBC News reported earlier this month, a plurality of households have been spending their relief checks on groceries, rent, and other necessities. Forty-five percent of respondents to a survey by Bankrate.com said their checks went to monthly bills, while 32% said they were using them to pay down debts.Just 13% reported they were using the money for discretionary spending.

    Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell told reporters that while higher rates of spending could drive inflation in the coming months, “an episode of one-time price increases as the economy reopens is not the same thing as, and is not likely to lead to, persistently higher year-over-year inflation into the future.”

    “Indeed, it is the Fed’s job to make sure that that does not happen,” Powell said.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As some San Francisco artists get basic income, how do we head off bad-faith arguments against it?

    Guaranteed income programs, no matter whom they support, must frequently battle the same zombie ideas.

    By Lily Janiak

    When the city announced last month that it planned to launch a pilot program to give more than 100 artists $1,000 monthly payments for six months, my hope for all the performers I write about and love was tinged with worry. I frequently see a couple of bad-faith arguments in response to the idea of state support of the arts, and I didn’t want them to hijack the conversation about a promising idea:

    • Bad-faith argument No. 1: Artists’ work isn’t real work, and if they can’t support themselves in the market, their art must be mere hobby.
    • Bad-faith argument No. 2: If the city is sending unrestricted cash to artists, could any Joe Schmoe throw some finger painting together and become eligible?

    The latter is further complicated by the idea that I want Joe Schmoes to have all the access to finger painting that their little fingertips desire; that I believe in all the Joe Schmoes’ potential to, one day, get so good at finger painting as to change the world with it, or at least change their own lives. My challenge, then, is to hold and articulate simultaneously two ideas that can seem contradictory:

    Everyone should have access to the arts as leisure, and some professional artists merit public funds for their art as work.

    Dorian T. Warren, an expert on guaranteed income, says the concept faces bad zombie arguments that won’t die.
    Photo: Community Change,

    When I shared my concerns with guaranteed income expert Dorian T. Warren, he reminded me of a felicitous phrase from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: zombie ideas. These are bad arguments that just won’t die, no matter how much data disproves them.

    “They’re not grounded in evidence,” says Warren, the president of Community Change and co-chair of the Economic Security Project, both nonprofits, and co-host of the podcast “System Check.”

    “They’re grounded in mythology.”

    Guaranteed income programs, no matter whom they support, must frequently battle the same zombie ideas. Warren trots them out with a sigh: “It’s going to make people lazy. They’re not going to want to work. They’ll spend it on drugs and alcohol.” All stem from centuries-old prejudices that the poor are poor by choice or moral failing, and that they won’t work jobs unless you punish or force them. Those prejudices mix with racial and gender bias, hence the persistent myth of “the welfare queen,” he adds.

    “It really goes to core distinctions of who is deserving and who is undeserving of support, particularly support of the government, and that is related to fundamental notions of who belongs and who doesn’t,” he says.

    “Do we think you belong in this political community we call the United States of America? If you don’t, you don’t deserve what the rest of us, who do belong, get.”

    That notion of belonging also applies to artists, whom our country frequently demonizes as some kind of “other.” It’s a lot easier to say someone doesn’t deserve to have their basic needs met if you make them out to be fundamentally different from you. It’s a lot easier to say artists don’t deserve a living wage for the TV shows you watch, and the music you listen to, if you write them off as weird or deviant.

    Lorrine Paradela, a single mother of two, is one of 125 Stockton residents receiving monthly cash disbursements, with no strings attached, as part of an attention-grabbing experiment on guaranteed income.
    Photo: Yalonda M. James, The Chronicle 2019

    Data from a slew of guaranteed income pilot projects across the country might help weaken, if not defeat, some of these zombie ideas. In addition to San Francisco’s program for artists, Oakland and Marin County both recently announced their own programs for people of color, and in 2019, the city of Stockton launched the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, a guaranteed income program for 125 city residents.

    In Stockton, preliminary results released in March show that not only are these zombie ideas wrong; at times, they’re backward. For instance, guaranteed income recipients were twice as likely to gain full-time employment as a control group, says Sukhi Samra, the director of SEED as well as the director of a new group, Mayors for a Guaranteed Income.

    She attributes that finding to two factors: “When you give people $400 or $500 a month, and it’s reliable, not only are they able to do the tangible, physical things, like put gas in their car to get to the job interview, but they also have increased mental capacity for goal-setting,” she says. “When you’re experiencing poverty, and each paycheck’s dollar is accounted for in terms of which bills it’s going to pay, you just don’t have the mental capacity to plan for your future.”

    Take all the time our artists spend on hold with the unemployment office, all the brain space they exhaust checking their bank account to make sure they don’t overdraft between freelance payments, all the bureaucratic hoops they jump through to make sure they have health insurance between gigs. Why, in the richest country in the world, do we demand artists waste so many of their resources? What if they could instead spend that time and energy composing a new symphony? Or dreaming up a new artistic form altogether?

    Chris Steele in Cutting Ball Theater’s “Utopia.” Steele is among those applying for San Francisco’s guaranteed income program.
    Photo: Nic Candito, Cutting Ball Theater

    In Bay Area theater, even artists at the pinnacles of their careers make minimum wage or less. For many, $1,000 per month would help to remove food and housing insecurity. Preliminary data from SEED shows that program recipients experienced not just less psychological difficulty, but less physical pain than a control group.

    San Francisco theater maker, drag queen, makeup artist and Poltergeist Theatre Project co-founder Chris Steele is applying to the city’s guaranteed income program partly for those reasons.

    “All of the times that I haven’t been able to rise to the occasion of my art have come from the fact that I have to do so many exhausting things in order to just have a roof and food and be able to live,” Steele says.

    “That kind of stress, that kind of constant anxiety not only changes your DNA, but it is just antithetical to the spiritual and mental place that you need to be in to create art.”

    Poltergeist Theatre Project’s “The Julie Cycle” creators and actors Britt Lauer (left) and Chris Steele in San Francisco.
    Photo: Paul Kuroda, Special to The Chronicle 2019

    Guaranteed income is different from other social safety net programs in that there are no strings attached. Once you’re enrolled, you don’t have to prove anything to keep it and you can spend the money however you want. In Stockton, Samra says, recipients spent their funds on groceries, rent and utilities.

    The concept is built on trust, Warren says. We don’t demand corporations spend their subsidies or tax breaks in a particular way, so why do we treat the poor differently?

    “That means you don’t trust me,” he says, putting himself in the place of a welfare recipient, “and that means you don’t respect me, and that means I have no dignity.”

    Distrust comes from a scarcity mind-set, a sense that resources are scarce and we’re all competing with one another. And who is it that helps us shift to an abundance mind-set? To see the world as full of wonder and possibility and joy?

    It’s artists. What a coincidence.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/sf-launches-guaranteed-income-pilot-program-for-130-artists/

    The post As some San Francisco artists get basic income, how do we head off bad-faith arguments against it? appeared first on Basic Income Today.

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  • How stimulus checks are being spent point to Americans becoming more prepared for the next emergency

    As new $1,400 Covid stimulus checks roll in, Americans are using them to pay monthly bills, regardless of their incomes, a new survey finds.

    By: Lorie Konish @LORIEKONISH

    KEY POINTS:

    • New $1,400 stimulus checks are helping Americans keep up with bills and other necessities, as well as pay down debt.
    • Recipients said they expect the funds to provide them a financial boost for less than three months, and in some cases not at all.
    • One year into the coronavirus pandemic, the results could point to shifting attitudes toward money.

    ____________________________________________

    As new $1,400 Covid stimulus checks roll in, Americans are using them to pay monthly bills, regardless of their incomes, a new survey finds.

    Bankrate.com found that 45% of Americans plan to use the latest round of checks for monthly expenses, followed by 36% who plan to use the money for day-to-day essentials, 32% who want to pay down debt and 28% who intend to add to their savings.

    (Respondents were allowed to choose more than one use.)

    Notably, just 13% of survey respondents said they will put the $1,400 payments toward discretionary activities or nonessential items.

    The payments of up to $1,400 per person, plus $1,400 per dependent, were approved by Congress in March through the American Rescue Plan Act.

    To date, the government has sent more than 156 million payments totaling about $372 billion.

    “Just as with the two previous rounds of stimulus, monthly bills and day-to-day essentials are the two most common uses,” said Greg McBride, chief financial analyst at Bankrate.com.

    Bankrate.com’s survey also found the cash infusion likely will not last long.

    About 61% of respondents said the money may contribute to their financial well-being for less than three months. Meanwhile, 34% said the funds would last less than one month, including 14% who said it would not help them sustain their financial well-being at all.

    The online survey was conducted between March 24 and March 26, and included 2,626 adults.

    Separate survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau from March 17 to March 29 found that people who had received a stimulus payment in the past seven days mostly used it to pay down debt.

    The results could point to changing financial behavior, just as the financial crisis prompted Americans to be more conservative with their money.

    “Nothing like a recession really underscores the importance of emergency savings and reducing your debt burdens,” McBride said.

    That’s as another survey from Bankrate.com found that fewer than 4 in 10 Americans have enough savings to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense. The first order of business for most households is they need to boost their emergency savings,” McBride said.

    “If this stimulus payment does that, in the long run the economy will perform better if Americans have more savings and less debt,” he said.

    ___________________________________________

    To read original article, please visit: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/14/heres-how-americans-are-using-their-1400-stimulus-checks.html

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  • Scotland has a ‘radical opportunity’ to introduce UBI, with the next Scottish Parliament expected to have a majority of MSPs who back it

    SCOTLAND has a “radical opportunity” to introduce a universal basic income (UBI), with the next Scottish Parliament expected to have a majority of MSPs who back the idea, campaigners have said.

    By Judith Duffy

    During the first leaders’ debate of the election, most parties – the Greens, Labour and the LibDems – said they were in favour of introducing a system where the Government guarantees a regular minimum income to every citizen.

    The Tories were the only party to rule it out, with leader Douglas Ross saying he was “not convinced by the argument”.

    Nicola Sturgeon revealed the SNP’s manifesto would set out steps towards introducing a universal basic income, even without the full powers over tax and social security required to implement it fully.

    She said: “I am very supportive of it and the pandemic has made me more supportive of it.”

    One of the countries which have conducted a basic income experiment is Finland, which ran a trial in 2017-2018 during which 2000 unemployed people received a monthly payment of €560.

    In Ireland, the Green Party has secured a commitment to initiate a trial of UBI in the lifetime of the current coalition government.

    Last week The Finnish Institute in the UK and Ireland held an event on UBI after the pandemic aimed at sharing lessons from the trial in Finland.

    Speaking at the online discussion, Jamie Cooke, head of RSA Scotland, pointed out that only a few years ago it was not an area of widespread discussion in Scotland.

    He added: “Currently we are heading towards elections here in Scotland in May of this year and at the leaders’ debate … four out of the five main political party leaders expressed their support for basic income as a concept and something to explore in Scotland.

    “So this is a radical shift and a radical opportunity for us to really take this forward, particularly as we look to a new parliament where I would hope and expect the majority of our parliamentarians will be pro-basic income in some form.”

    Questioned on how such a system could be funded, Cooke suggested exploring ways to gather levies from data could one option.

    “Data is one of the biggest – if not the biggest – resources in the world just now, most of which flows directly into private pockets,” he said.

    “It is not benefitting individuals financially, it is not benefitting society. I’m not saying it is an easy thing to do, [but] to find ways to tap into that as a resource would be a huge opportunity to start to pay for these kind of investments, which would have multiple benefits further down the line.”

    Minna Ylikanno, a senior specialist at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment in Finland, and adjunct professor in the Department of Social Policy at the University of Turku, also suggested ways could be found to fund basic income, such as targeting huge corporations that “somehow slip away from every tax system”.

    She added: “We had dreams that were hugely costly – free schooling, free school meals for children and we managed to do that and we still exist as an independent country.”

    Tuomas Muraja, a Finnish freelance journalist and author who was one of the 2000 people selected to take part in Finland’s two-year basic income trial, said the arrangement allows more freedom, increasing both creativity and productivity.

    “Basic income would put an end to the humiliation of the poor – students, unemployed people, stay-at-home mothers and fathers and retired people would gain more control over their own lives,” he said.

    ____

    View original article here: https://www.thenational.scot/news/19224718.holyrood-radical-opportunity-introduce-basic-income-system/

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  • IRS confirms monthly checks will begin being sent to parents starting in July

    “We have to create an entirely new structure for the Internal Revenue Service. We are not historically a benefits delivery federal agency,” Rettig said on Tuesday.

    By Kenadi Silcox

    The IRS says it will be ready in a little more than two months to start sending monthly payments to parents as part of the newly enhanced Child Tax Credit. The news came in a Senate Committee on Finance hearing Tuesday, in which IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said he expects the system to send out monthly payments to be ready by July 1.

    Some 69 million households are set to benefit from the payments that some are calling “monthly stimulus checks” for parents of up to $300 per child. The payments are a provision in the American Rescue Plan that’s supposed to temporarily expand eligibility for the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and pre-pay half of the tax benefit in a way that’s similar to a monthly child allowance.

    But concerns over the IRS’s ability to roll out an unprecedented monthly payment program, particularly after pushing the tax filing deadline to May 15 and while busy sending out the third round of stimulus checks, have left a cloud of mystery surrounding the logistics of the 2021 changed to the Child Tax Credit.

    According to Rettig, in order for the IRS to establish a system for sending out monthly benefits, the agency will need to hire at minimum 300 to 500 employees to deal with the increased volume of calls, oversee investigations of fraud and build out a web portal for the benefit by July 1. Under the financing guidelines outlined in the American Rescue Plan, Rettig says the estimated cost will be around $391 million.

    “We have to create an entirely new structure for the Internal Revenue Service. We are not historically a benefits delivery federal agency,” Rettig said on Tuesday. “It’s a challenge to do it by July 1.”

    The substantial challenge that comes with preparing the IRS to dole out benefits is why some experts have suggested delegating benefit distribution to the Social Security Administration, which already has the infrastructure for sending out checks to millions of people each month.

    Another challenge facing the IRS is ensuring families have an easy way to opt out if they would rather receive a lump sum payment as a tax refund rather than half of it as a monthly payment, particularly because many of those families may no have consistent internet access. Rettig addressed this concern during the hearing, saying “If people do not have broadband, they’ll end up needing to deal with us through paper sources,” either via the U.S. Postal Service or in-person at their nearest IRS agency.

    For those with internet access who wish to opt out, Rettig said that the IRS will be setting up an online portal by July 1 similar to the page the agency set up for stimulus check distribution. Parents can also use the portal to identify any changed circumstances like a new child and the age of each eligible recipient. Children under the age of six are eligible for up to $3,600 while all other children can get up to $3,000 this year.

    While Rettig affirmed the agency’s commitment to meeting the July 1 deadline put forth by Congress, he did note that if all systems are not ready to go by then, they will need to push back the rollout date. Some questions still remain around logistics for parents that the IRS is not yet prepared to answer, including how they will deal with families who end up being over- or under-paid come tax season next year or what the deadline will be for parents to opt out of monthly payments.

    On the congressional side, question marks also still remain regarding the future of the enhanced benefit. Although it was initially designed to be a temporary program as part of the coronavirus pandemic relief, many Democratic lawmakers have indicated that they would support making the Enhanced Child Tax Credit permanent. Others, including Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), have proposed upending the tax credit all together and rolling that money plus certain welfare programs into a monthly family benefits program.

    _____

    To see original article please visit: https://www.deseret.com/platform/amp/2021/4/2/22356886/how-birth-rate-covid-help-drive-mitt-romney-family-security-act-to-bipartisan-support

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  • Is The GOP Becoming More Supportive of Direct Cash Payments?

    By Andrew Trunsky

    • After years of fiscal conservatism and deficit hawkishness, the Republican Party has shown signs of a shift toward a more populist, pro-worker economic platform.
    • Some Republicans have introduced proposals aimed at increasing the minimum wage or providing cash relief that hardly resemble previous efforts to cut spending or taxes, but instead mirror increasing calls to help working-class Americans who were struggling even before the coronavirus pandemic.
    • “There has been a strongly populist bend,” Republican Rep. Peter Meijer told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “I think we’ve seen a lot of folks who are guessing that’s the way the party is going, and are proposing options that are more based around generating broad political support than they are around pursuing a more narrow policy end.”
    • “There’s a recognition [among Republicans] that the government already constantly intervenes in the market,” said Rachel Bovard, the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. “There is a growing number of people on the right who are saying, ‘we already do this … Why aren’t we doing it to support the people who make up this country?’”

    After years of rhetoric echoing fiscal conservatism and deficit hawkishness, the Republican Party has shown signs of embracing a more populist, pro-worker economic platform as more Americans look to the government for financial help.

    Some Republican lawmakers have introduced proposals since the pandemic began aimed at increasing the minimum wage or providing cash relief that hardly resemble previous efforts to cut spending or taxes, but instead mirror increasing calls to help working-class Americans who were struggling even before the coronavirus pandemic. And while some in the party debate what forces have driven the change within the party, there is little doubt among Republicans that change is occurring.

    “There has been a strongly populist bend,” Republican Rep. Peter Meijer, a freshman from western Michigan and a member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

    “I think we’ve seen a lot of folks who are guessing that’s the way the party is going, and are proposing options that are more based around generating broad political support than they are around pursuing a more narrow policy end.”

    Meijer is one such Republican. He has advocated for direct cash relief instead of existing welfare programs that have large bureaucratic components and generate “paperwork overhead” for those depending on it, arguing that it can deliver critical aid to struggling Americans in more effective means that adheres to the idea of limited government.

    He even introduced his Direct Dollars Over Government Expenses ($DOGE) plan, which would have given $2,400 checks to qualifying Americans instead of the $1,400 outlined in the American Rescue Plan. His bill, however, was nearly $1 trillion smaller than the ARP, which President Joe Biden signed into law on Mar. 11.

    President Joe Biden signs the American Rescue Plan into law. (Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

    ‘For Whose Benefit?’

    Republicans also overwhelmingly supported earlier bipartisan relief plans that included direct checks, including the CARES Act passed last March and the stimulus passed in December, despite their extraordinary size and scope.

    “There’s a recognition [among Republicans] that the government already constantly intervenes in the market,” Rachel Bovard, the senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute, told the DCNF.

    “The debate right now is for whose benefit should that be done? … There is a growing number of people on the right who are saying, ‘we already do this, why aren’t we doing it for the family? Why aren’t we doing it to support the people who make up this country?’”

    Even though every congressional Republican voted against the American Rescue Plan largely due to its lack of targeted relief, Meijer said that there is bipartisan opportunity regarding cash payments and other pro-worker policies.

    “There are Republicans who are willing to enter into good-faith negotiations,” Meijer said, discussing how there were broad areas of agreement over coronavirus vaccine and testing aid and direct payments for individuals and small businesses.

    Sen. Mitt Romney speaks alongside a bipartisan group of lawmakers as they announce a proposal for a Covid-19 relief bill. A bill was finally agreed upon after months of negotiations, and was signed by President Trump on Dec. 27. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

    When asked if a large aid bill primarily focused on cash relief and pandemic aid would have sailed through Congress with bipartisan support: “I believe it would,” Meijer said. “Those earlier [relief] bills were not viewed with an inherently partisan lens.”

    Not only has cash relief become more popular among lawmakers and voters alike, but an increasing number of Republicans believe that its expansion can coexist with the idea of fiscal conservatism.

    “Direct cash payments have long been part of the conservative playbook,” Scott Lincicome, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF.

    “There has always been an attraction among free-marketers for the most basic type of assistance, which is a direct cash payment … Basically, you just give people money.”

    Far From Unanimous

    Many Republicans have pushed back against the intraparty shift and instead advocated fiscal conservatism and deficit hawkishness even with the pandemic. A majority of Senate Republicans blocked a December push for $2,000 stimulus checks multiple times even after former President Donald Trump backed the effort, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell labeling them as a “universal cash giveaway” and “socialism for rich people.”

    Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson blocked a bipartisan attempt to include $1,200 checks instead of the $600 ones in the December stimulus.

    “What I fear we’re going to do with this bipartisan package … is a shotgun approach,” Johnson said, objecting to the amendment’s size and lack of targeted funds.

    Few in Congress have adhered to the fiscal conservative line more than Sen. Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican from Kentucky. He not only voted against every major coronavirus relief bill, but has also never voted for the annual defense spending bill or federal budget.

    “We have no rainy day fund. We have no savings account,” Paul said in December before the stimulus passed. “Congress has spent all of the money. Congress spent all of the money a long time ago. The monster spending bill presented today is not just a ‘deficit’s don’t matter disaster,’ it is everything Republicans say they don’t believe in.”

    But despite the populist shift within the GOP and the growing bipartisan consensus that direct checks are efficient, effective and relatively simple, Republicans say that they are concerned about government spending, and have increased their calls to address the growing national debt since Biden won.

    “Cash payments are rarely, in the real world, an alternative to welfare,” Lincicome said. “They are a supplement. And I think that’s really where things can go off the rails, at least from a conservative viewpoint.”

    “[Conservatives] have always envisioned payments as a replacement to the welfare state, not a supplement to the existing welfare state,” Bovard said, mentioning how Meijer’s bill beefed up cash payments and pandemic aid while almost eliminating other non-targeted relief.

    But even with the concerns over the debt and Republican worry that hyperinflation may occur as a result of the American Rescue Plan, Bovard said that conservative lawmakers who were overly focused on deficits and spending are not in tune with the country or their voters.

    “An ideological clinging to deficit hawkishness as if that’s the only thing that matters, as if that’s the biggest threat, is completely missing the stakes of how most people see the world right now,” Bovard said.

    “It’s still an issue, but it’s not the ultimate one. People aren’t threatened every day by the debt.”

    “I think you have a lot of Republican donors that want to put the debt and the deficit in the driver’s seat because it’s the only thing they feel threatened by. But the reality is, the base of the Republican Party feels threatened on a day-to-day basis by tons of other forces,” she added.

    Sen. Josh Hawley speaks during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on March 2, 2021. Sen. Tom Cotton looks on. (Graeme Jennings-Pool/Getty Images)

    Bipartisanship?

    Though the two parties have sharply diverged on social and cultural issues and partisan gridlock has become the default, signs of bipartisanship have appeared among Republicans and Democrats who have pushed for more pro-worker policies. Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley jointly introduced a proposal for $2,000 relief checks in December after Trump said the $600 checks in December’s stimulus package were too small, and the pair later introduced similar plans to raise the minimum wage after the Senate parliamentarian excluded it from the American Rescue Plan.

    And even though most Republicans opposed Democrats’ effort to pass a $15 minimum wage, some, like Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, introduced a joint plan that would raise the wage up from the current $7.25.

    “There is a bipartisan consensus that austerity politics and faith in pure market absolutism has failed the working and middle class in America,” California Rep. Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from Silicon Valley, told the DCNF. “We can come together to have industrial policy that creates good paying jobs in places left behind and that increases wages for those without a college degree.”

    “Recognizing the dignity of work and importance of community is not a left or right idea,” he added.

    “It is an idea rooted in ensuring that every American has an equal voice in our democracy and participates in the American dream.”

    ____

    View original article here: https://dailycaller.com/2021/03/30/republicans-embracing-economic-populism-cash-relief-minimum-wage/

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  • Organizations across the globe publish World Health Day manifesto in defense of vaccination and universal basic income

    Capitalism is the problem, social movements denounce on World Health Day.

    By Michele de Mello, translated by Ítalo Piva

    On April 7th, World Health Day, hundreds of social movements from around the world published an international manifesto in defense of life. After more than a year since the outset of the biggest pandemic this century, the world continues to average about 9 thousand deaths by covid-19 per day.

    To mark the date and make a global appeal, the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), which articulates hundreds of social movements and political parties on five continents, is organizing an Anti-imperialist Week of Struggle from April 7th to 11th, demanding that the vaccine against the novel coronavirus be treated as a public asset, among other things.

    In the manifesto, the internationalist network declares that “the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the contradictions of capitalism throughout the world, which puts profit above people’s lives”.

    Therefore, in the economic field, organizations demand that governments guarantee a universal basic income so that workers may comply with health measures – such as social distancing – and provide lines of credit so that small and medium-sized companies do not go bankrupt. With regards to geopolitics, they argue that the international debts of every nation and all conflicts should be suspended.

    “We are at a stage of the social struggle that we call an ideological struggle.

    “The main thing to be done is to make people aware of their rights so that society, in its different forms of organizing, puts pressure on their governments”, defends João Pedro Stedile, one of the leaders of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), which is also part of the IPA international network.

    In Brazil and other Latin American countries, symbolic acts of protest are scheduled in various capitals for the week of struggle. In Europe, the IPA’s task is to collect 1 million signatures to demand that the European Parliament discuss a proposal to make the vaccine a public asset – something advocated by the internationalist network and by the United Nations (UN) itself.

    Concentration of power

    Worldwide, approximately 664 million people have been vaccinated against covid-19, however, the vast majority are in the United States (165 million), China (140 million) and the European Union (79.8 million), according to a survey by the Nosso Mundo em Dados website.

    The United Nations recognizes that the world’s largest economic powers hold 75% of the immunizations already produced, while about 130 nations have not even been able to kick off a vaccination program.

    “The countries where capitalism is most developed are stashing and doing business among themselves in regards to vaccines.

    “More than 130 countries have not yet started vaccinating simply because they are not part of this business model”, points out the president of Spain’s Communist Party, José Luis Centella Gómez.

    Europe and Latin America are experiencing fresh waves of contagion due to the emergence of new variants of the virus. In Brazil, the P1 and P2 strains appeared, which are more contagious and aggressive. In the United Kingdom, the VUI variant was detected for the first time, which can be 40% to 70% more transmissible and has already spread to Germany, Spain, Italy, Denmark and even Australia.

    On the day that the World Health Organization (WHO) celebrates its 73rd year, social entities in Europe are demonstrating at the European Union headquarters, as well as UN buildings to demand equitable access to inoculations.

    “The United Nations, which on other occasions was very belligerent, has now been unable to raise its voice against the powerful. This leads us to once again demand a restructuring of the body and that the UN comply with its founding charter.

    “Instead of being an element of pressure, they are not playing any role”, criticizes Centella.

    The creation of the Covax consortium, promoted by the WHO, the Alliance for Vaccination (Gavi) and the Coalition for Innovation in Preparation for Epidemics (Cepi), which promises to distribute 2 billion doses by the end of 2021, was not enough to promote democratic access to vaccines. Therefore, the current principal demand is for breaking the patents on vaccines against covid-19.

    The proposal has been defended by India and South Africa in the World Trade Organization (WTO), since October last year. It would allow the vaccine formulas to be freely distributed, providing decentralization and accelerating their production. Although 100 countries support the measure, the United States, the European Union and Brazil were opposed to it.

    “The quickest way to produce the vaccine in poor countries is by breaking the patents. Hence, the laboratories that already exist in these countries, as is the case with Brazil, would start producing without concern for royalties and licenses”, explains João Pedro Stedile.

    While vaccine production remains governed by market logic, the largest pharmaceutical companies get richer. According to a survey by Forbes magazine, during the pandemic, 40 new billionaires from the health sector emerged, including the directors of Moderna and Biontech.

    In addition to preventing the release of the vaccine patent, the United States and the European Union have already acquired, in previous contracts, double or triple the number of doses necessary to immunize their entire populations. This market reserve has been constantly denounced inside UN bodies by representatives from Mexico, Venezuela, Russia and China.

    Since the start of the pandemic, the Chinese government has advocated that the vaccine be declared a universal asset.

    China is the largest exporter of vaccines in the world, sending around 500 million doses to more than 40 countries.

    For the president of the Spanish Communist Party, the root of the problem lies in the very structure of the current political-economic system.

    “We want to make it clear how capitalism is not part of the solution to any problem, but is the problem itself. Humanity is not free from suffering a pandemic, a natural disaster, but it must have the mechanisms available to deal with these issues. Today we have natural and medical resources available, but they are in the hands of a few.

    “So it is increasingly evident that we must end capitalism lest it ends humanity”, concludes José Luis Centella.

    View original article here: https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2021/04/07/capitalism-is-the-problem-social-movements-denounce-on-world-health-day

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  • National basic income could quickly cut Canadian poverty in half: budget watchdog

    Providing Canadians a basic income could cut poverty by almost half in 2022, based on the federal poverty line.

    By Jolson Lim

    A national guaranteed basic income modelled after a pilot program that once existed in Ontario could cut poverty levels nearly in half, according to Canada’s spending watchdog.

    The overall cost of the program would be $85 billion in 2021-22, increasing to $93 billion in its fourth year, although eliminating a wide array of federal and provincial tax credits no longer needed could fund much of the project through new personal income-tax revenues. 

    In its estimate, the parliamentary budget officer (PBO) used parameters in Ontario’s 2017 basic-income pilot project, which was later cancelled by the Ford government.

    A single person would get up to $16,989 a year and a couple would get $24,027. Disabled Canadians would receive a $6,000 top-up. The more someone earns, the less he or she would receive, at a rate of $0.50 for every dollar earned. 

    Providing Canadians a basic income could cut poverty by almost half in 2022, based on the federal poverty line.

    The decrease would be most felt in Manitoba and Quebec, where 60 per cent fewer people would find themselves living below the poverty line.

    In Ontario, poverty would decrease by 49 per cent, close to the national average. In Newfoundland and Labrador, it would fall the least, by 13.5 per cent. 

    Canadians in the lowest income quintile would benefit the most, with disposable household incomes increasing by $4,535, or 17.5 per cent. 

    Meanwhile, the disposable household incomes of Canadians in the third, fourth, and fifth income quintiles would fall by at least $1,371.

    In total, the disposable income of 6.4 million Canadians would go up under a basic income program. However, it would fall for about 16.8 million people, due largely to the loss of tax credits, such as the basic personal amount.

    The increase among the lowest income quintile would be felt most acutely in Manitoba, where disposable incomes would increase by $6,094, or 23.7 per cent.

    Elsewhere, the household disposable incomes of the lowest quintile in Ontario would go up by 20 per cent, or $5,369. In Prince Edward Island, the average disposable income would increase by $2,966, or 11.4 per cent.

    However, the guaranteed basic income’s effect on labour supply would be “small,” the PBO wrote.

    The reduction in hours worked ranges from a high of 1.5 per cent in Nova Scotia to a low of 0.7 per cent in Alberta. Similarly, payroll costs would fall by 1.3 per cent nationally.

    Behavioural changes, such as employees working fewer hours, would increase the program’s costs by more than $3 billion a year, however.

    The idea of a basic income has grown in popularity, especially during the pandemic, which proponents say has exposed major flaws in Canada’s social safety net. 

    The Green Party has endorsed a guaranteed livable income, while the NDP has voiced its support for a basic income pilot in P.E.I.

    At their convention starting Friday, New Democrats will debate a resolution to implement a guaranteed basic income in Canada. 

    At their convention starting on Thursday, the Liberals plan to debate a resolution to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of basic income, and to explore ways to streamline current federal-income support. Members of the Liberal caucus, including some ministers, support a national basic income.

    The Trudeau government has set a goal to cut the 2015 poverty level in half by 2030. Ottawa managed to reduce poverty by 30 per cent in 2019, surpassing its target to cut it by 20 per cent in 2020, according to federal figures.

    Not everyone is on board, though. An expert panel appointed by the B.C. government concluded last January that “moving to a system (with) a basic income for all as its main pillar is not the most just policy option.” It would be too costly, and wouldn’t necessarily help the non-financial problems that cause people to need money in the first place, the report said.

    Instead, the panel says the B.C. government should bring in improvements and targeted actions, including a basic income for certain vulnerable groups.

    The federal deficit is expected to reach $363.4 billion in 2020-21, the PBO said last week.

    View original article here: https://ipolitics.ca/2021/04/07/national-basic-income-could-quickly-cut-poverty-in-half-budget-watchdog/

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  • 24% of unemployed workers have been jobless for over a year

    By Greg Iacurci

    • Nearly 2.4 million Americans were unemployed for at least a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which issued its March jobs report on Friday. That represents 24% of all unemployed.
    • The statistics offer a snapshot through the middle of last month, about a year after the Covid pandemic began to upend the labor market.
    • Long-term joblessness is increasing even as the U.S. unemployment rate falls. That’s an unusual dynamic during recessions, economists said.

    Nearly a quarter of all unemployed workers in the U.S. have been out of work for at least a year, a stretch of joblessness dating to the early days of the Covid pandemic.

    The dynamic speaks to persistent — and rising — long-term joblessness even as the national unemployment rate falls.

    That divergence is unusual during downturns and highlights the unequal (or K-shaped) nature of the recovery, economists said.

    Nearly 2.4 million Americans were unemployed 52 weeks or more in March, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

    That’s almost double the number in February and is about 1.6 million more people than in March 2020.

    ‘Breathtaking’

    In all, those long-term unemployed represented 24% of the 9.9 million total jobless workers last month, according to the bureau. (The data are without seasonal adjustments.)

    “I think that number is pretty breathtaking, that nearly a quarter of unemployed workers have been unemployed for over a year,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute and former chief economist at the Department of Labor from 2014 to 2017.

    “It really shows that even as the economy is recovering, you have a lot of the same people who have been unemployed throughout this whole damn thing,” she added.

    The statistics offer the first glimpse of joblessness a year after officials began issuing lockdown orders to contain the coronavirus and millions of Americans began filing for unemployment benefits.

    And that number is likely an undercount since the department doesn’t consider certain workers, like those who left the labor force entirely due to pandemic health risks or child-care duties. And the share may rise next month, since the current numbers only offer a snapshot through the middle of last month, which doesn’t quite align with the flood of unemployment filings toward late March and into April 2020.

    The bureau doesn’t break out these long-term unemployment numbers by industry.

    But it’s likely that workers among this group are overrepresented in the hardest-hit industries, like leisure and hospitality, Shierholz said. More than 3 million jobs in that sector have yet to return — accounting for more than a third of the total.

    Long-term unemployment

    Long-term unemployment has risen steadily throughout the health crisis and is near a Great Recession peak.

    Economists consider workers to be long-term unemployed after at least six months without work.

    It’s an especially dangerous period for households from a financial perspective. Finding a new job becomes more difficult, workers’ long-term earnings potential is scarred and the odds of losing a job if they find one down the road increase.

    The federal government has stepped in to offer income support by extending and raising weekly unemployment benefits. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which President Joe Biden signed last month, extends aid through Labor Day and offers a $300 weekly supplement to state benefits.

    However, not all workers qualify for assistance, despite broader eligibility criteria during the pandemic.

    More than 4 million Americans were jobless for six or more months in March — or 43.4% of all unemployed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday.

    That’s almost on par with the record 45.5% share hit in the aftermath of the Great Recession.

    The share is growing even as the U.S. unemployment rate fell to 6% in March. The U.S. gained 916,000 jobs, the most since the summer.

    In recessions, unemployment and long-term unemployment generally move up and down together, Shierholz said.

    “That is not what’s going on here,” she said. “Right now, they’re going in a totally opposite direction — you have unemployment coming down, and long-term unemployment going up.”

    The number of Americans out of work for at least a year is still about half the peak hit after the Great Recession.

    In April 2010, more than 4.6 million people had been out of work at least 52 weeks, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It took another 20 months for that number to dip below the 4 million mark.

    However, long-term unemployment may not linger to the same extent this time around, given the pace of vaccinations and the trend of the economic rebound.

    View original article here: https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/04/06/24percent-of-unemployed-workers-have-been-jobless-for-over-a-year.html

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  • Consumers are Using Their $1400 Stimulus Checks to Pay Down Debt and Household Bills

    What doxo’s data tells us about how consumers are spending their third $1400 stimulus check.

    doxo’s data shows that once stimulus checks started to appear in people’s accounts, they almost immediately began to use the money to pay household bills. From March 17th to March 21st, we saw a 30% increase in the number of payments as compared to the same period last month. During that time frame, the total amount of payments made were 37% higher as compared to the same period last month.

    Increase in payments when comparing data from 3/17 to 3/21 to the same time period in February 2021:

    Number of paymentsAmount of payments
    Total29.8%37.2%

    Based on the above, combined with publicly available information related to the total amount of stimulus checks and the fact that according to doxo, consumers spend $4.404 Trillion per year on household bills, we estimate that the majority – 62% – of the $1400 stimulus checks are being used to pay household bills.

    Consumers are using the money to pay down debt/money they owe

    doxo’s data also reveals that consumers are using the stimulus money to pay down debt/money they owe, in what appears to be big chunks. The fact that the average payment amount increased even greater than the volume is an indication that many people were catching up on missed or reduced prior payments (something that, when surveyed in October 2020, they indicated they had needed to do: 42% of Americans have skipped paying one or more bills since the COVID-19 pandemic started).

    Bill pay categories (that align to what those consumers indicated they would pay with their stimulus checks) where this is the most obvious include:

    • Credit Cards: we have seen a 29% increase in credit card payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 72% increase in terms of the amount paid
    • Utilities: we have seen a 23% increase in utilities payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 41% increase in terms of the amount paid
    • Cable/Internet: we have seen a 20% increase in cable/internet payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 25% increase in terms of the amount paid
    • Mobile Phone: we have seen a 13% increase in cable/internet payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 16% increase in terms of the amount paid
    • Loans (mortgage, HELOCs, Auto, etc.): we have seen a 12% increase in loan payments as compared to the same period last month, and a 13% increase in terms of the amount paid

    Increase in payments for the categories with the most change when comparing data from 3/17 to 3/21 to the same period in February 2021 :

    Number of paymentsAmount of payments
    Credit Cards 28.5%72.0%
    Utilities23.0%40.7%
    Cable & Internet19.7%25.4%
    Mobile Phone12.7%15.6%
    Loans (auto, mortgage, home equity, etc.)11.5%13.4%

    View original article here: https://www.doxo.com/insights/consumers-are-using-the-majority-of-their-1400-stimulus-checks-for-household-bills/

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