Biden’s Massive Stimulus Check
By: Julia Zhou
Recently, Joseph R. Biden has taken the position as our country’s President. One of his first decisions was to provide a huge COVID-19 relief package, or stimulus check: A whopping $1.9 trillion dollars! If you write it out, it’s 1,900,000,000,000 – almost 20 billions times a single hundred dollar bill. However, some government officials strongly disagree.
A stimulus check is something the (U.S.) government provides to its taxpayers, or ordinary citizens who pay taxes. People pay taxes to build new roads or public buildings, like libraries, and for their children to attend public schools or charter schools, among other things. That’s how teachers are ordinarily paid. Every adult citizen must pay taxes, and additionally, there are many kinds of taxes. There are taxes to the government for the building of those things mentioned above, school taxes, taxes when buying things, and taxes when you professionally earn income.
A stimulus check may be administered when something devastating and destructing occurs, like a major war, famine, or pandemic like nowadays. However, a stimulus check doesn’t have to be administered during those times – it simply is used to “stimulate the economy”, to get people spending money, so more money runs through people and businesses, thus “boosting consumption and spurring the economy” so people are generally happier and richer. Both cases are shockingly valid for our situation, with a harsh pandemic and many businesses/people losing money, then going out of business, becoming unemployed, and needing financial support. This is why these days stimulus checks are more commonly referred to as relief packages.
Donald Trump, the former President of the United States (POTUS) did provide relief packages to the public in an effort to minimize the difficulty of these times because of the coronavirus. However, a trillion-dollar one is almost unheard of, unimaginable, even in comparison to that of WWII’s, at 12 billion dollars distributed among the West European countries, which is scarily almost 160 times smaller.
Government officials, particularly Republicans, disagreed with this idea. They proposed a $600 billion dollar relief package ($600,000,000,000) which still seems considerable, but when divided among all the U.S. households, is smaller than previously decided. Mainly, however, Republican senators are deciding to “scale down” the stimulus checks for high income households with yearly incomes of more than 150,000 dollars. The Biden administration was willing to lower from 1.9 trillion, but not to 600 billion. Another proposal offers $160 billion for vaccine development and face masks along with other medical materials, with “direct payments” to families in need.
The Democrats and Republicans are still in the stages of negotiation, and soon a vote will be passed to decide the outcome of their battle.