Spanning more than 1,800 pages, the bill represents a partisan laundry list of mostly bad policies, calling for trillions of dollars of additional deficit spending on handouts and items unrelated to the crisis.
Lawmakers should focus on the task at hand and respond directly to the public health crisis and its related effects, not abuse these unprecedented circumstances to push through partisan priorities that would derail the recovery.
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Lawmakers must work together to create the conditions to safely reopen America, removing barriers to working, creating, and trading, and to enable American society to rise up again and drive the economic recovery.
1. Extending the $600 unemployment bonus: The bill would extend the misguided and harmful $600 unemployment bonus through January 2021, with an additional extension possible through March of next year.
It’s one thing to provide short-term and targeted unemployment benefits during forced shutdowns, but providing a year’s worth of unprecedented additional unemployment benefits—up to an extra $30,000 or more per worker—would be devastating to our economy, potentially even threatening our ability to combat COVID-19 and Americans’ supply of essential goods and services.
Using taxpayer dollars to pay unemployed workers more than employed workers is incredibly unfair to the hardworking Americans who continue to work each day—and wholly un-American.
Policymakers should be focused on creating the conditions that enable the 1 in 5 Americans who have lost their jobs to reconnect with their previous employers or find new employment, instead of incentivizing them to remain unemployed until 2021.
The HERO Act’s perverse unemployment benefits threaten the well-being of the workers they claim to want to help. Tantalizing workers with unemployment benefits equal to 150% or 200% of their usual earnings will only hurt them in the long run, by leading to long-term unemployment and to lower incomes and fewer opportunities, while slowing the American recovery.
2. Lifting the SALT cap: The House Democrats’ bill would lift the current $10,000 cap on the federal deduction for state and local taxes in 2020 and 2021.
Temporarily lifting the cap would provide a two-year windfall tax cut to the wealthiest taxpayers in the highest-tax states.
Before the 2017 reforms, high-tax states such as California, Connecticut, and New York were subsidized by other federal taxpayers across the country. In the case of high-income California taxpayers, the federal state and local tax deduction reduced their overall state tax bill by 40%.
If this proposed change to uncap the deduction were made permanent, it could encourage state governments to increase some of their most economically harmful individual taxes, slowing the economic recovery and passing the costs onto more responsible states.
3. Bailing out states and localities: The bill also includes more than $1 trillion in aid to state and local governments with the vast majority being unrestricted aid that does not directly respond to costs incurred in the fight against COVID-19.
Congress should not be sending blank checks to states and localities, which would only serve to bail out many states that are financially mismanaged and to prop up excessive levels of state and local government spending, and could set a dangerous precedent for the future.
Congress can avoid creating perverse incentives by relieving state governments of unfunded mandates and federal red tape that raise costs and reduce the effectiveness of state and local spending.
4. Forgiving student loans:
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