The Biden emergency coronavirus plan — a summary

On Jan. 14, 2021 the “Washington Post” published a summary of President-elect Joe Biden’s proposed emergency coronavirus plan (“What’s in Biden’s 1.9 trillion emergency coronavirus plan”). While ambitious, there is no question the multiple crises the plan is expected to address are also daunting. Note this is a plan whose budgetary provisions would need to be considered and voted upon by Congress.

Here is a summary of its most notable provisions as reported by the Post along with some of my comments.

Twenty billion dollars would be invested in a vaccination program that would link the federal government in partnership with states, localities, tribes, and territories. Included would be plans for supporting community vaccination centers and mobile vaccination units for rural areas. It is worth noting that access has been an especially difficult problem and one it would appear the new administration intends to address.

The plan calls for expanded access to emergency paid leave including paid sick, and family leave and medical leave for parents with child care responsibilities.

Remote and hybrid learning has been especially difficult during this period and parents, students, and school administrators have been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to reopen. According to the summary, the proposal would allocate $130 billion to help schools reopen which could include reduction of class size, and modifying spaces for social distancing, improved ventilation and PPE.

Funding would be provided for 100,000 public health workers to provide vaccine outreach and contact tracing.

This category includes stimulus checks, expanded unemployment benefits, eviction protection, addressing the hunger crisis, minimum wage and expanding child tax credits.

This would include $2,000 stimulus checks, that is $1,400 additional to the $600 previously paid. As we might remember, the amount of the next stimulus payment almost sank the previous stimulus package as it moved through Congress as Democrats and President Donald Trump were in rare agreement to increase the payments from $600.

According to the Post article, the Biden plan