COVID relief package not enough

Members of Congress are out and about Monday taking a victory lap over having reached an agreement on a $908-billion COVID-19 relief package that will bring stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits to millions of Americans.

Let’s hope they don’t dislocate their shoulders patting themselves on the back.

Not because they might struggle to obtain treatment at overwhelmed hospitals with infections raging out of control across the country — as denizens of Capitol Hill they undoubtedly have access to medical care many other Americans can only dream of.

But because the relief package they drafted won’t come close to addressing the economic crisis spreading coast-to-coast in the virus’ wake.

Rather than coming together to alleviate the rise in unemployment, poverty and hunger sweeping the nation, they staged a spectacle of dysfunctional governing.

Their work all but guarantees the economic recovery will be painfully slow and leave the most vulnerable Americans even lower on the economic ladder than they were when the pandemic first appeared.

Nationwide, the proportion of American households living below the federal poverty line (about $12,760 for an individual and $26,200 for a household of four), rose to 11.7 percent in November from 9.3 percent in June as initial pandemic relief expired, according to researchers at the University of Chicago and Notre Dame.

Let’s not mince words: The blame here belongs almost entirely to the Republican Party. The GOP flatly refused to negotiate a new relief package after passage of the CARES Act in late March, specifically to take up the $3-trillion Heroes Act passed by the Democratic-controlled House in May, even after the House offered up a pared-down $2.2-trillion measure in October.

Republicans tied their objections to concerns about the federal deficit. That’s a spectacularly dishonest and cynical position, given they hadn’t shown any concern about the deficit when enacting a $1.5-trillion tax cut for their well-heeled patrons in December 2017.

Now that a Democratic administration is entering the White House and the fiscal benefits would flow chiefly to the middle- and working class, the GOP claims to have rediscovered the virtues of thrift.

The Republicans tied state and local aid to a provision that would absolve business owners of liability for workplace COVID infections. As I wrote in July, this vicious proposal amounted to an invitation to employers to abandon any but the most minimal safety measures for their workers.

Obviously, workplace liability has no relationship to state and local funding. The two sides weren’t negotiating over different ways to address the crisis of state and local government; this was just an attempt by the GOP to hold the localities hostage to a handout to business.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell (R-KY.) and his GOP minions kept saying they didn’t want to reward supposedly profligate blue states, an assertion I labeled “nakedly partisan and plain ludicrous.”

The truth is some of the most deeply suffering states are red as can be, including Alaska, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming, all of which face declines of more than 15 percent in revenues due in part to pandemic-related price drops for oil and other natural resources.

Despite the benefits in this measure, U.S. pandemic relief remains among the most skinflint, cheeseparing packages in the developed world. It’s also among the most poorly targeted.

The latest measure is valued at about 4.25 percent of gross domestic product — that is, a proportion of the economy. The previous relief measures signed in March were worth a combined 14.3 percent, bringing the total to about 18.5 percent.

By contrast, according to figures from the International Monetary Fund, Germany provided fiscal relief valued at nearly 40 percent of GDP; Britain, nearly 26 percent; Japan, 35 percent; France, 21 percent.

(The figures include spending, foregone revenues, loans and loan guarantees enacted through early September).

At best, relieving Americans of the devastation of the pandemic is unfinished business.

If this latest relief measure is the best our government leaders can muster in the face of the most dire national emergency since the Great Depression, shame on them.