The Senate may possibly get around to voting on the House coronavirus response bill that includes paid sick leave for many workers, expanded unemployment insurance, and free coronavirus testing. The House, meanwhile, is moving ahead with the next plan—or really, massive list of proposals. Some Republicans have started saying they’re open to direct cash payments to keep families afloat during coronavirus-related closures and restrictions on normal life, and that’s just what House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters proposes—along with a lot of other important stuff.
Waters’ first proposal is for adults to get $2,000 a month and children to get $1,000 a month. That would help a lot of families get through the crisis. Additionally, she calls for all consumer and small business credit payments—mortgages, student loans, small business loans, and more—to be suspended, while the Federal Reserve or Treasury would ensure that the creditors on those loans stayed solvent. That’s not all.
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Waters offers ways to protect people from sustaining the kind of financial harm that would follow them after the pandemic: she’d suspend negative credit reporting not just through the pandemic but for 120 days after, and prohibit debt collection, repossession, and wage garnishment.
COVID-19 also poses a threat to people’s homes. Waters proposes to ban evictions and foreclosures while the pandemic dominates life, protecting landlords by requiring mortgage forbearance on rental properties, too. To help people in public housing programs, she proposes suspending work and community service requirements, because people should not be required to go out in public and potentially be infected by or spread the disease to stay housed. She also calls for waivers and modifications of existing programs to allow a flexible response to the crisis.
Waters also calls for $5 billion in emergency homeless assistance, $10 billion in Community Development Block Grants to help state and local governments respond to the crisis, $290 million in fair housing enforcement, and $300 million for service coordinators who would help elderly households.
Then there are the provisions for small businesses: grants, tax rebates, suspension of commercial rental payments. And the call for funding emergency production of medical supplies. And the temporary ban on companies doing stock buybacks and paying dividends, “to ensure that companies are using their excess cash to pay workers, shore up their bottom lines, and invest in their communities.”
While Senate Republicans have been fussing and moaning about paid sick leave and the Trump administration has suddenly pivoted to “we’re serious” mode, Maxine Waters has been coming up with this incredible list of plans to help everyone from small business owners to homeless people to people struggling to pay the mortgage to people struggling to pay the rent to people living in public housing. This proposal is a challenge to the rest of the House, to the Senate, and to the White House: Want to do better? Here’s how.