'Doomed to fail': Why a $4 trillion bailout couldn't revive the American economy

[Eugene]

Alternate Washington Post headlines:
• U.S. plans to spend more on coronavirus relief than on Afghan war, with much of money going to big companies
• The U.S. coronavirus bailout spent trillions solving the wrong problem

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Source: Washington Post

‘Doomed to fail’: Why a $4 trillion bailout couldn’t revive the American economy

An avalanche of U.S. grants and loans helped the wealthy and companies that laid off workers. Individuals received about one-fifth of the aid.

By Peter Whoriskey, Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O'Connell
Graphics and design by Youjin Shin and Cece Pascual
Updated Oct. 5 at 12:30 p.m.

The four spending bills that Congress passed earlier this year to address the coronavirus crisis amounted to one of the costliest relief efforts in U.S. history, and the undertaking soon won praise across the political spectrum for its size and speed.

The $4 trillion total of government grants and loans exceeded the cost of 18 years of war in Afghanistan.

“We’re going to win this battle in the very near future,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) after the Senate approved the Cares Act, the largest of the four measures.

Six months later, however, the nation’s coronavirus battle is far from won, and if the prodigious relief spending was supposed to target the neediest and move the country beyond the pandemic, much of the money missed the mark.

The legislation bestowed billions in benefits on companies and wealthy individuals largely unscathed by the pandemic, according to a Washington Post analysis, while at the same time allowing special aid for unemployed workers to expire over the summer and leaving some local public health efforts struggling for money to conduct testing and other prevention efforts.

The relief packages amounted to a massive economic Band-Aid for what is fundamentally a health crisis, and much of the relief consisted of economic measures similar to those that have worked in previous recessions. ...

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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/business/coronavirus-bailout-spending/

[PSPS]

1. It was a joke.

A pittance was direct payments to families, which is where the embers of the economy reside, and that stimulated the economy as far as it went.

The lion's share was bailouts to wealthy GOP donors, who never needed it (except to launder back as "campaign contributions,) and giant corporations, who spent it on stock buybacks (which raises CEO compensation) and bonuses for the executives (i.e., they still fired employees.)

What should have been done is to immediately start routine direct monthly payments to all families to keep them afloat, and maintain the lockdown for several months so the virus would die due to lack of available hosts. If that had been done, all of this would be behind us.

The fact is that we're still going to have to do this but we can't while the GOP is in power. So this could drag on for at least another six months, probably longer.