Where the Hell Is Our Stimulus Check?
By: Miles Howard
Tags: Covid 19, Congress, America, Universal Basic Income, Coronavirus

Where the Hell Is Our Stimulus Check?

Millions of Americans are still waiting to see what little stimulus is available to them

Photo: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

For most Americans, living in the United States means living on the edge of bankruptcy. Our wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living. We don’t have social safety nets that guarantee health care or housing for all. And by now, it’s well established that nearly 40% of Americans would struggle to rustle up as little as $400 in the event of an emergency.

This is how things were in the United States before the Covid-19 pandemic — before our lives were suddenly relocated indoors for the sake of slowing down the spread of the novel coronavirus. Now, with millions of people losing their jobs each week and local economies on the verge of collapse, the precarity of living in the United States has been magnified enough to force Congress to actually do something, before things fall apart.

The $2 trillion stimulus package that Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed in late March was supposed to be an economic lifeline to people who are burning through what little savings they may have. But it’s been more than two weeks since the stimulus passed. Congress has gone on recess. The number of coronavirus deaths in the country has skyrocketed. The social distancing guidelines have been pushed into May (as they should be). And as of today, millions haven’t received one dollar from the government.

But hey, when you’re starving, crumbs aren’t nothing.

The stimulus package rollout has been a betrayal of ordinary working people. There’s a long and noncommittal timeline for when 80 million Americans will see their one-time $1,200 check show up in their bank account. If the IRS has your account set up for direct deposit, the check could arrive as soon as this week. But if not, it could take as long as 20 weeks for physical checks to arrive at your doorstep—perhaps even longer, now that Trump is slowing down the production of these checks so that his signature can be added to each one.

This indifference toward the vulnerability of ordinary Americans is a reminder that the stimulus was a lavish giveaway to corporations, with crumbs for the rest of us. But hey, when you’re starving, crumbs aren’t nothing. And those $1,200 checks for individuals, or $2,400 for married couples, were just one feature of the stimulus package. Small businesses were supposed to receive government-backed loans, which included cash advances as high as $10,000. But the Small Business Administration has struggled to keep up with the high demand. Those $10,000 cash advances that were supposed to come with the Economic Injury Disaster Loans have been shrunken into a miserly $1,000 advance per employee. And as for unemployment, good luck getting through the state benefits systems, many of which are so neglected that most of today’s engineers don’t even know the coding language that’s required to fix the faulty web portals.

It didn’t have to be this way. Germany and Canada figured out how to wire far more substantial cash payments to their citizens within a couple of days. This is how things should have gone in the United States, given that most Americans are in a far more vulnerable position when it comes to avoiding bankruptcy. And yet, the benefits of the stimulus bill were administered through systems that have been allowed to rot for decades, practically guaranteeing that the people who need cash most urgently wouldn’t receive their money quickly enough. Let’s remember: Rent and mortgage payments have not been universally frozen. Credit card companies basically get to decide whether or not they’ll waive interest rates or extend payment deadlines for desperate customers. Massachusetts, my home state, hasn’t even passed a law that would halt evictions just yet.

All of this points to two crises of culture in America. The first one is owned by our elected officials. The second falls on the rest of us.

To say that most politicians don’t understand how most Americans live isn’t exactly news. The growth of wealth inequality in the United States—and the decline of what little social welfare we have—is symptomatic of a political class that governs with the well-being of the comfortable in mind, at all times. Even during a pandemic, the vulnerability of being poor in the United States isn’t properly impressed upon leaders like Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi. Under their leadership, both bodies of Congress — and by extension, both of the country’s major political parties — have declined to put forward a pandemic aid plan that actually gets people the money they need, in the time that they need it.

Unfortunately, this is not just a problem with Congress. I live in one of the more liberal U.S. states. Massachusetts has a permanent Democratic supermajority in the House and Senate. But this hasn’t translated to bolder and more equity-minded leadership here. Massachusetts is also one of the most expensive places to live in the United States, and, unsurprisingly, it’s one of the most unequal. The immense wealth of our state is capital we could have funneled toward correcting these inequities long ago — by building far more permanently affordable housing in cities like Boston, or by expanding our public transit infrastructure. Either of those initiatives would improve the lives of millions of poor people who live here. But the Massachusetts Legislature neglected to take those steps, and now, as our state becomes a coronavirus hot spot, that intransigence is holding our politicians back from giving people the lifelines they need.

There are now multiple bills in the Massachusetts House that would essentially create a temporary emergency universal basic income (UBI) program for poor people, as we wait for more cash support from Congress. Given how the stimulus has already failed so many of us, passing one of these bills is a moral necessity. But like Congress, my state legislature isn’t doing what needs to be done because our leaders are socially distanced from the reality of our lives.

And yet, we keep electing them. We keep putting up with them — buying their rewarmed rhetoric about how good things only come at a glacial pace. This idea falls apart as soon as you look beyond the United States and comprehend what the rest of the world has done since the coronavirus pandemic began. Rent and utility bill freezes seem unthinkable here. But in France, those pandemic relief measures actually happened. The same goes for UBI, but in Spain, the government recently passed a law that will establish this program for Spanish citizens. That Americans aren’t looking at this and talking about it relentlessly is a reminder that in the United States, there’s a deep aversion — hostility, even — to any curiosity about the world beyond our borders. Call it a hallmark of American exceptionalism, but it’s why our elected officials are allowed to bungle their response to the Covid-19 pandemic and keep their seats. It’s also why most of us are still waiting for the money that the stimulus was supposed to provide.

I don’t have a lot of hope that Americans are suddenly becoming more curious about how the rest of the world lives and what we could have here. (Democrats just tapped Joe Biden to run against Donald Trump in November.) Even as tens of thousands of us die from the coronavirus, while millions of others lose their livelihoods, the United States still doesn’t seem ready for a sea change in policy and elected leadership. But maybe the failure of the stimulus will change things. This country runs on money, for better or worse, and when you take that away from people, the United States as we know it cannot sustain. Pending some miraculous infusion of cash into most U.S. households, we’re going to find out how long Congress can deny people the most basic of material necessities before people and communities elect to take matters of survival into own hands.

That might sound like a nightmare — like chaos. But it doesn’t have to be.