Last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell released a proposal mislabeled as a COVID-19 relief bill. I say “mislabeled” because the $1 trillion proposal includes little that will relieve people harmed by the pandemic. Full disclosure: I am not an economist. I’m a social worker, a profession that’s allowed me to spend decades working with the families now suffering most in the COVID-19 economy, like parents struggling to afford diapers for their children, as reported in The New York Times. Their well-being has nothing to do with abstractions like stock market fluctuations.
The personal economy of low-income people is concrete: Your food dollar goes farther when you can get transportation to a good supermarket. You spend less on asthma medications if you can afford to run the air conditioner. When good things like this happen, it stimulates the broader economy, because deferred purchases finally get made. Kids get new shoes. A road trip to see the grandparents is doable. An ancient space heater gets replaced.
The Health, Economic Assistance, Liability Protection and Schools (HEALS) Act does not fund this kind of economic stimulus. It includes lots of benefits for businesses, including making business meals fully deductible, exceeding even 1986 levels. There is a free lunch after all, but not for everyone. Subsidizing well-salaried business executives by giving them a free lunch at a restaurant does nothing to feed the 27.5% of United States households with children who are experiencing food insecurity, a huge jump even from the Great Recession. Increasing funding to SNAP would keep kids fed, but the HEALS Act sends no funding to the single-most effective program we have to combat malnutrition. Nor does it extend the now expired Pandemic EBT program which helped families who lost access to school breakfast and lunches.
HEALS also replaces a $600 weekly federal benefit for unemployed workers with a $200 benefit. That doesn’t heal; it hurts. The reduction is based on fears that $600 is too generous and will lead people to refuse opportunities of employment. A Yale University study proved that the benefit did not affect the rate at which people returned to work. Plus, the end of the $600 benefit coincides with the end of a national moratorium on evictions.
The obvious cruelty of the bill is exceeded only by its shortsightedness. Public expenditures on a chronically homeless person average $35,578 a year, with the biggest expense being health care. Just giving a person $600 a week and keeping them housed would save taxpayers more than $4,000 a year.
Despite the best efforts of some senators, the bill under consideration now excludes $200 million in emergency grant funding to help low-income families get diapers.
My organization, the National Diaper Bank Network, fought hard for that funding. In the best of times, one in three young families struggles to provide enough diapers for their children. Our 200-plus community-based diaper banks could never supply enough to meet the need. Since the pandemic, requests for assistance have doubled, even tripled in some places. That $200 million—less than 20% of what the “HEALS” act proposes to spend on P-8A Poseidon aircraft for the Navy—would keep babies clean, dry, and healthy.
Funding for diapers would also help the economy. To go to work, parents need access to child care and children who are healthy enough to send there. Most centers require parents to supply disposable diapers as a condition of caring for their children. As I said above, for one in three families, that requirement is a barrier. Our research showed that in addition to reducing diaper rash, providing families with free diapers was linked to the children needing fewer pediatric sick visits.
Families who couldn’t use child care because of diaper need lost an average of four paid workdays a month. Every $1 we spent on diaper assistance resulted in $11 in economic gain for the family—as well as rises in state sales tax revenues associated with families having more cash to use for those deferred essential purchases. While the Poseidon has a million bells and whistles, small things like diapers are close to magic.
Giving families diapers might be the most effective COVID-19 relief move possible, though supplying other basic needs like food, housing, and electricity would also be highly beneficial. As would simply giving people in need consistent cash—in the form of the $600 supplementary unemployment benefit, or something else.
Perhaps people like me spend too much time arguing about the justice of making sure everyone in the U.S. has their basic needs met. We must also argue the urgency of ensuring that all of our neighbors have the ability to participate in the economy—because there simply won’t be an economy without them.