Pelosi Pessimistic About Coronavirus Aid Deal

By Yuval Rosenberg

Hopes Fade for Coronavirus Stimulus Package

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin spoke again Thursday as part of a last-ditch effort to
reach an agreement on a coronavirus relief bill before Congress
leaves town ahead of the election, but no breakthroughs on a
potential deal were announced.

The atmosphere around the talks was notably strained. White
House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said early Thursday that
Mnuchin had offered a $1.6 trillion proposal and criticized Pelosi
for failing to take the offer seriously.

"It’s a good offer but it’s one Nancy Pelosi is not interested
in," McEnany said in a press briefing. "Nancy Pelosi is not being
serious. If she becomes serious then we can have a discussion."

Pelosi said the offer was too small and was focused more on
helping the rich than ordinary citizens. "This isn’t half a loaf,
this is the heel of the loaf," Pelosi told Bloomberg.

Pelosi cast doubt on the chances of a deal during a private call
with House Democrats, listing several areas where the two sides
remain far apart, Politico
reports.

Still, Pelosi told reporters that she wanted to keep working
toward a deal. "We're hopeful that we can reach agreement because
the needs of the American people are so great. But there has to be
a recognition that it takes money to do that," Pelosi told
reporters at her weekly press conference.

The White House proposal: The $1.62 trillion proposal
offered by Mnuchin includes $250 billion in assistance for state
and local governments, a boost of $100 billion over the previous
Republican offer but still well short of the $436 billion Democrats
are seeking. It also includes a proposal for $400 per week in extra
unemployment benefits, running from September 12 to the end of the
year, a third less than the $600 per week in the House bill.

Other provisions in the White House proposal include $300
billion for another round of $1,200 stimulus checks for most
Americans adults; $160 billion for businesses, including
restaurants and airlines; $150 billion for education; $75 billion
for Covid-19 testing; $60 billion for rental assistance; $50
billion for vaccines; $50 billion for health care providers; and
$25 billion for child care.

Republican lawmakers express doubts: Even as Pelosi
criticized the White House proposal for being too small, some
Republican lawmakers said they would have trouble supporting it
because it would be too large.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), the top Republican on the House Ways
and Means Committee, who played a key role in passing the GOP tax
cuts in 2017, said he was concerned about spending too much money
on things like aid for the unemployed and state and local
governments. "How much wasteful spending will we have to swallow to
do this?" he asked during an interview with Fox Business
Network.

Sens. Ron Johnson (R-WI) and Rick Scott (R-FL) said they would
probably not support the White House plan, with Johnson saying he
was unlikely to back anything larger than $650 billion bill that
failed in the Senate earlier this month.

Talks to continue. Pelosi and Mnuchin
were expected to speak again on Thursday. Meanwhile, the House is
expected to vote on the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill Democrats
unveiled earlier this week. Pelosi said that voting on the bill
will not preclude making a deal with Republicans, although the vote
was delayed on Wednesday in order to give negotiators more time to
make a deal.

Layoffs Mount and Jobless Claims Keep Coming

About 837,000 people filed for state unemployment benefits last
week, the Labor Department
announced Thursday, and another 650,000 people
applied for aid through the federal Pandemic Unemployment
Assistance program for self-employed and gig workers. Combined, the
weekly claims numbers come to more than 1.4 million.

The total number of people receiving state and federal
unemployment benefits rose slightly to 26.5 million.

The state claims number was lower than the week before and
better than expected, although economists warned that the data from
California likely skewed the results as the state adjusted its
processing and reporting system, while claims rose in the federal
system. More broadly, economists said that although the months-long
downward trend appears to be holding, new jobless claims remain at
unprecedentedly high levels six months into the coronavirus
recession.

"There is clearly a stalling out in the improvement in the
domestic labor force," said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at
the consulting firm RSM. "In particular, the rise in the number of
persons on unemployment insurance and the increase in the number of
people on PUA need to be monitored, because that signals we’re
likely to have a sustained issue over the next couple of years
inside the labor market, particularly pertaining to transportation,
leisure, hospitality in general, aviation and hotels in
particular."

Layoffs piling up: The weekly jobless claims report comes
as major employers announced new layoffs in a still-struggling
economy. This week, Disney said it would fire 28,000 workers,
Allstate Insurance said it would lay off 3,800, Ralph Lauren said
it would lay off 3,700 and Dow Inc. said it would reduce its global
staff by 6%. Major airlines said they would begin furloughing
staff, including 19,000 at American Airlines and up to 16,000 at
United Airlines, although those moves could be reversed if the
companies received a new round of federal aid in the bill currently
under negotiation.

Incomes slipping: Personal income in the U.S. fell in
August by 2.7%, the Commerce Department said Thursday, with the
expiration of enhanced unemployment benefits playing a major role.
"The decline in income highlights the impact of the expiration of
the extra $600 in weekly jobless benefits at the end of July, which
had temporarily propped up household finances and helped spur
consumption," Bloomberg’s Olivia Rockeman
reported. "While President Donald Trump in early
August announced an additional $300 a week in federal jobless
benefits, many states didn’t get those funds out until early
September, and the benefit only lasts six weeks, meaning that
further declines in income could continue later this year."

Trump Is the Largest Driver of Coronavirus Misinformation:
Study

President Trump was the single largest driver of misinformation
about Covid-19 over the first months of the pandemic, according to
a
new study by Cornell University researchers.

The researchers analyzed more than 38 million articles about the
pandemic published in English-language media around the world from
the beginning of the year to May 26. They found that more than 1.1
million articles, or just under 3%, contained misinformation — and
mentions of Trump accounted for nearly 38% of "the overall
misinformation conversation" more than any other topic.

"We conclude that the President of the United States was likely
the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation ‘infodemic,’" the
researchers write, applying the term that the World Health
Organization has used for the widespread falsehoods circulating
about the coronavirus pandemic.

The study has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Why it matters: Misinformation about
the pandemic is "one of the major reasons" the United States is not
doing as well as other countries in fighting the pandemic, Dr.
Joshua Sharfstein, a vice dean at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg
School of Public Health and a former principal deputy commissioner
at the Food and Drug Administration, told
The New York Times.

Most Favor Biden on Preexisting Conditions, but Republican
Voters Trust Trump

Which presidential candidate will do better at preserving
protections for people with preexisting medical conditions? That
might seem like a silly question to some readers, since President
Trump’s administration is backing a lawsuit seeking to invalidate
the Affordable Care Act, including those protections. But the
president has pledged to maintain those protections — he issued a

toothless executive order to that effect last week
— and, as Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz detail at
The New York Times, Republican voters believe
him.

While
most voters say that Joe Biden will do better at
maintaining protections for people with preexisting conditions —
including 93% of Democrats and 57% of independents in a recent
Kaiser Family Foundation survey — Republicans overwhelmingly trust
Trump more on the issue (84% in the KFF poll). A Commonwealth Fund
poll similarly found that 81% of Republican likely voters said
Trump was more likely to protect coverage for those with
preexisting conditions.

"They believe
the repeated promises he makes, at campaign
rallies, in Twitter messages and with executive orders — despite
his support of lawsuits and legislation that would do the
opposite," Kliff and Sanger-Katz write.

The Times reporters spoke to a dozen voters who
said Trump would do a better job on pre-existing conditions and
found that the voters not only believed the president but also
couldn’t believe that any politician would undo the
protections.

"There is not a single guy or woman who would run for
president that would make it so that pre-existing conditions
wouldn’t be covered," Phil Bowman, a 59-year-old retiree in North
Carolina, told the Times. "Nobody would vote for him."

The bottom line: Trump and Republican lawmakers
have struggled to come up with a plan that would match the
protections created under the Affordable Care Act, but Trump’s
repeated promises are clearly enough to convince GOP partisans,
even if other voters remain skeptical.


Read more at The New York Times.

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