250,000 Dead. Where Are Trump, Pelosi and McConnell?

By Yuval Rosenberg

Trump White House Says Stimulus Bill Up to Congress

President Trump had no public events scheduled for Wednesday. It
was the same on Tuesday, when The Washington Post’s Philip Bump

noted that the president’s public calendar has
been empty for 10 of the 14 days since Election Day — make it 11 of
15 now — though Trump had held six events, played four rounds of
golf and tweeted or retweeted some 400 times over that time while
fuming over his election loss. Trump also canceled plans to travel
to his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida for Thanksgiving.

"It feels like bunker mentality," one White House official told

CNN.

Politico
asked, “Is Trump done being
president?”

Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic rages on, with new U.S.
cases up 29% over the past week, total confirmed cases now topping
11.4 million and 1,707 new Covid-19 deaths reported just on
Tuesday. Total U.S coronavirus-related deaths
just surpassed 250,000.

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany
told “Fox & Friends” Wednesday that Trump is “hard at
work on Covid, among other issues” and that the country would hear
from him “at the right moment.”

That lack of engagement apparently extends to coronavirus relief
legislation. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told reporters
Wednesday that any additional discussions on a stimulus package
would be up to Congress. “Obviously those discussions -- if they
happen -- will be dictated by the House and the Senate,” Meadows
said, according to
Bloomberg News. “We haven’t seen a real
willingness by our House colleagues to look at that.”

Meadows, who met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
(R-KY) on Wednesday, said that getting a stimulus deal “has been a
priority for the president,” but Bloomberg’s Erik Wasson and Laura
Litvan note that the chief of staff’s remarks “are further evidence
that the White House is pulling back from the discussions after
Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden.”

Congress and the White House also have to approve new spending
legislation to prevent a partial government shutdown after December
11, when current federal funding expires. Meadows told reporters
that it’s a “high priority” to keep the government funded, but said
he “can’t guarantee” a deal will be reached.

McConnell again slams Democratic stimulus plan: House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer (D-NY) wrote to McConnell on Tuesday, asking him to
“come to the table” to negotiate coronavirus relief
legislation.

The GOP leader reportedly has not responded to the letter, but
he reiterated this week that he remains open to a “targeted” bill
of about $500 billion and he again criticized the Democrat’s much
larger bill. “Huge tax cuts for rich people in blue states, but no
second round of the Paycheck Protection Program? Those are their
priorities?” McConnell
said Tuesday. He described Democrats’ insistence on
additional aid for state and local governments as a “fixation on a
massive slush fund … unlinked from COVID need.”

He followed up in additional
remarks on the Senate floor Wednesday: “The
problem is that their proposal is a multi-trillion dollar
laughingstock that never had a chance of becoming law.”

The bottom line: Lawmakers are reportedly optimistic
about passing funding legislation. “We are on a good path to do
that,” Pelosi
told reporters Wednesday. But a stimulus deal,
much like the president, remains out of sight.

Quote of the Day

“I know now we have this big debate. Is it $2.2 trillion,
$1.5 trillion? You gotta be kidding me. I mean just split the baby
and move on. This is childish behavior on the part of our
politicians.”

– JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon,
referring Wednesday to the differences between
Democrats and Republicans in negotiations in Washington over the
coronavirus relief bill.

12 Million Americans Could Fall Off the ‘Jobless Benefits
Cliff’: Report

About 12 million Americans will lose federal unemployment
benefits at the end of the year if Congress fails to pass new
legislation, according to a
new report from the liberal-leaning Century
Foundation that examines the toll that failure could take on both
households and the broader economy.

The “jobless benefit cliff” will occur on December 26, when
federal funding for two of the main emergency unemployment programs
created by the Cares Act — Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and
Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation — runs out. Here’s how
researchers Andrew Stettner and Elizabeth Pancotti break down the
numbers:

About 7.3 million unemployed people will lose their
Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) benefits on December 26. PUA
provides aid to self-employed and gig workers, who are usually
unable to participate in state benefit systems. Another 945,000
people will exhaust their PUA benefits before the December
expiration date.

About 4.6 million people will lose their Pandemic
Emergency Unemployment Compensation benefits on December 26. PEUC
provides extended benefits for unemployed workers who have hit the
time limit in their state-level programs. Another 3.5 million
people will have run out of PEUC benefits before December 26.

All told, the 12 million people who will lose their
federal unemployment benefits on the day after Christmas account
for more than half of the 21.1 million currently receiving any type
of jobless assistance. About 3 million of the workers losing
federal aid will be able to access state-level unemployment
programs, but the majority will be left with no benefits past the
expiration date.

Unlike during previous recessions, the unemployment programs
created by Congress in the Cares Act back in March came with “hard”
cutoff dates, Stettner and Pancotti say, which means payments will
be ended immediately, regardless of how many weeks of eligibility
an aid recipient may have left. “Previous laws, such as the
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, had a soft cutoff,
which allowed individuals already receiving benefits to continue
doing so until their full term was exhausted, but stopped any
additional workers from qualifying,” the researchers write. “The
important difference here is that a soft cutoff creates a gentle
downward slope for workers and the economy, while a hard cutoff
creates a cliff.”

Effects on households: The researchers reviewed the
literature on how long-term unemployment affects individuals and
households, and the results are not pretty. Those who are jobless
for more than 26 weeks and lose unemployment aid suffer in
virtually every aspect of their lives, from their ability to
maintain housing and pay bills to the condition of their mental and
physical health, and the negative effects are long-lasting. “For
this reason,” Stettner and Pancotti write, “Congress has
historically provided federal support for extended benefits when
large numbers of Americans are facing long-term unemployment and
keeps these benefits in place until well into a cycle of
recovery.”

Effects on the economy: Most economists see aid to the
unemployed as an important means of maintaining demand in the
economy during a recession, supporting jobs by pumping dollars into
local businesses. “Unemployment insurance benefits have been proven
over and over again to be one of the best dollar-for-dollar
stimulus programs,” the researchers say. But the hard cutoff of
benefits at the end of December for millions of workers will create
more drag in the middle of an economic recovery that is already
slowing. Stettner and Pancotti estimate that the loss of federal
unemployment assistance will reduce spending in the economy by
about $2.5 billion per week, a number that will grow as more
workers exhaust their state benefits in early 2021.

In previous recessions, lawmakers waited longer to end emergency
unemployment aid programs, giving the jobless more time — often
years — to get back on their feet. If Congress allows it to occur,
the December 26 cutoff will pull the plug in less than 12 months,
even as the primary cause of the crisis — a raging pandemic —
gathers strength.

“Nobody is talking about this,” Stettner
told The Washington Post. “We’re just careening
into this huge cliff and it’s like it’s not even happening. People
are just totally, completely ignoring the situation at a time when
things are getting worse before they’re going to get better in
terms of public health.”

Number of the Day: 3 Million

More than 3 million people in the U.S. are currently
contagious with Covid-19, according to an analysis by Columbia
University epidemiologist Jeffrey Shaman. The number is about twice
that once people who have caught the virus but are not yet
contagious are taken into account. “It’s bad; it’s really, really
bad,” Shaman
told The Washington Post. “We’re running into
Thanksgiving now and that’s only going to make it worse. We’re
going to go through a lot of people being infected between now and
the end of the year, unfortunately.”

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