While impeached president Donald Trump is happily pretending that life can get back to pre-coronavirus normal while the pandemic still rages throughout the states, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is not so sanguine. He is aware of the skyrocketing unemployment and the Trump recession. He, seemingly alone among Republicans, acknowledges that more stimulus is going to have to happen. But he, being a member of the Trump administration, is apparently going to attach the strings of shutting down transparency.
He's ready to negotiate for new legislation to pour more money into the economy, but he has conditions. It has to be targeted to reopening businesses, and which businesses and how much money they get will have to be a secret. He says that where the more than $500 billion of taxpayer money authorized by Congress has been spent is "proprietary" and "confidential" information. In other words, the Chamber of Commerce and all the individual businesses like the Ritz-Carlton are unhappy that they had to answer questions about why they got billions when thousands of real small businesses got little or nothing. But he wants more of that secret money to go out now.
Other than that: "We're open-minded," he told lawmakers Wednesday, "but we absolutely believe small businesses—and by the way many big businesses in certain industries—are absolutely going to need more help." This was in testimony to the Senate Small Business Committee. While extending the $600/week boost to unemployment benefits for the millions of people now out of work past the current July deadline is uncertain, Mnuchin wants to pour more money into the Paycheck Protection Program that has proven problematic. (Disclosure: Kos Media received a Paycheck Protection Program loan.)
He told Senators that he's "pleasantly surprised" by recent economic data, having expected that the economy was "going to bottom in June and not May." He hasn't been paying attention to recent public health news and the reality that new cases are surging in a very large chunk of the country. Or he doesn't feel he can contradict dear leader. Maybe he's trying to work around the edges of the issue by conceding that more economic stimulus is going to have to happen when he says: "I definitely think we are going to need another bipartisan legislation to put more money into the economy."
It should, however, be aimed at certain recipients, he says, and that doesn't include actual, individual people who were employed in every walk of life, or previously unemployed. He wants the next round of funding to be targeted at the travel, leisure, and restaurant industries. "Whatever we do going forward needs to be much more targeted particularly to the industries and small businesses that are having the most difficulty in reopening as a result of Covid-19," he said. "We look forward to working with you and the rest of the committee over the next few weeks as we think about that."
But we the people can't know which specific businesses are getting the money—taxpayer money—anymore. That is "proprietary" and has to be kept "confidential," when it's our damned money. And he doesn't want to help the mass of us out. If this were really about keeping people paid and/or employed, the government would have been united in supporting subsidized payrolls for all businesses and recurring payments to everyone. It wasn't and it didn't and now people who are really hurting, people who don't have enough money for food and housing and medicine and all of the essentials, are having to put aside the threat of catching a potentially fatal disease to go back to work.
Which, Mnuchin said Thursday, is essential. "We can't shut down the economy again. I think we've learned that if you shut down the economy, you're going to create more damage," he said on CNBC, taking entirely the wrong lesson from the last three months. It wasn't the shutting down the economy that created the damage. It was the decision to not provide for the needs of all the American people in this extraordinarily awful time in the most generous and straightforward way possible. That, and having a belligerent lunatic with only bad impulses over which he has no control sitting in the Oval Office.