Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin reached out to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer Wednesday to suggest restarting talks. But, Pelosi said in a statement, "he made clear […] the White House is not budging from their position concerning the size and scope of a legislative package." Immediately after that, the squatter in the Oval Office kneecapped Mnuchin anyway, announcing that a deal is "not going to happen."
No one knows why these things appear in Trump's head and then come out of his mouth, but it seems pretty darned likely that this was spurred by Democrats' insistence that the deal include funding for the Postal Service and elections assistance to the states. “The bill’s not going to happen because they don’t even want to talk about it, because we can’t give them the kind of ridiculous things that they want that have nothing to do with the China virus,” the racist Trump said Wednesday. Following that, Mnuchin released his own statements acceding to Trump's directive. “The Democrats have no interest in negotiating,” he said, declaring it over.
Trump insisted Wednesday that the actions he's calling executive orders would save the day, limiting evictions, providing jobless aid, and deferring payroll taxes, even though it's pretty clear they do none of those things. The one real executive order he made, the one that's in his purview, doesn't limit evictions at all. It just tells federal agencies to think about whether they should do something to stop them. His jobless aid is extremely stingy, effectively halving the the $600 a week payment bump the unemployed had been relying on until July 31, when it expired, and taking the bonus away entirely from anyone who receives less than $100 a week in state unemployment insurance. What's more, Trump is jeopardizing funding for natural disaster response just as wildfire and severe storm season really kicks in. He's taking $44 billion from the FEMA Disaster Relief Fund for the payments—money that is expected to last about five weeks. The pandemic is not going to be over in five weeks.
Trump also touted his payroll tax cut, the other thing he's been obsessing about throughout the entire crisis despite repeated slap-downs from even fellow Republicans and despite the fact that it's probably not going to happen and would be of no significant help, anyway. There are way too many people not on any payroll right now for it to act as any kind of stimulus. Many employers will probably choose not to implement it because they would have to eventually claw that money back at the end of the deferment period. Then there's the big issue: It harms Social Security and Medicare, which Trump denies. Any money lost, he said, would be replaced. “We’re taking it out of the general fund,” Trump said, and when pushed on what that would do to the deficit, he employed more magical thinking: “We’re going to have tremendous growth.”
We're not going to have tremendous growth. Even if Pelosi's HEROES Act, at $3 trillion, passed. The Congressional Budget Office estimated a few months ago—before it became clear just how long this pandemic is going to last because of Trump's malfeasance—that the hit to the nation's gross domestic product over the next decade would be $16 trillion. Expect that ticker to go up with every month that passes in which the virus isn't contained.
Meanwhile, Sen. Mitch McConnell is back on the sidelines, doing his usual trolling, pretending like he hasn't been refusing to act on the crisis for months. Pretending that his refusal to consider the HEROES Act after the House passed it three months ago hasn't made the situation 10 times worse. Right now, it appears that the Senate is going to recess for the remainder of the month on Thursday.
Congress is going to come back after the Labor Day recess on Sept. 8. They will then have three weeks, or about 15 working days, to meet the next big deadline—the end of the fiscal year and government funding on Oct. 1. Whee. At this point, McConnell seems to be counting on using that looming disaster to try to force the Democrats' hand on coronavirus relief.
While 1,000 people a day are dying from coronavirus. While 30 to 40 million people are facing eviction. While as many as 17 million children aren't getting enough to eat.
