Congress set to approve unprecedented $2-trillion stimulus plan
WASHINGTON— The $2-trillion (U.S.) economic stabilization package agreed to by Congress and the Trump administration early Wednesday is the largest of its kind in modern American history, intended to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and provide direct payments and jobless benefits for individuals, money for states and a huge bailout fund for businesses.
The measure, whose final details were still being drafted Wednesday evening, amounts to a government aid plan unprecedented in its sheer scope and size, touching on every facet of American life with the goal of salvaging and ultimately reviving a battered economy. Its cost is hundreds of billions of dollars more than Congress provides for the entire U.S. federal budget for a single year, outside of social safety net programs. Administration officials said they hoped that its effect on a battered economy would be exponentially greater, as much as $4 trillion.
The legislation would send direct payments of $1,200 to millions of Americans, including those earning up to $75,000, and an additional $500 per child. It would expand jobless aid, providing an additional 13 weeks and a four-month enhancement of benefits, extending payments for the first time to freelancers and gig workers.
The measure would also offer $350 billion in federally guaranteed loans to small businesses and establish a $500-billion government lending program for distressed companies reeling from the impact of the crisis, including allowing the administration to take equity stakes in airlines to help compensate taxpayers for the aid. It would send $100 billion to hospitals on the front lines of the pandemic.
“This is certainly, in terms of dollars, far and away the biggest ever done,” President Donald Trump said at the White House, where he veered from his usual partisan vitriol and praised Democrats for their work on the agreement. “That is a tremendous thing because a lot of this money goes to jobs, jobs, jobs — and families, families, families.”