Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

That headline is a bit misleading, I think. They don't want another expanded supplementary Federal benefit, the way the proposal that was on the table has it. But what Mnuchin agreed to is an extension of the unemployment benefits that are set to expire at the end of the year. It's only "dramatically lower" if the new baseline is the emergency bill they rushed through last time around.

I am not taking the side of the Republicans or this White House, because there were Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, who favored the expanded benefit BEFORE the election when they thought it would buy them votes (demonstrating just how principled they are), but the extended Federal benefit they did the first time around had a lot of people taking home more in unemployment benefits than they had been earning when they had a job. That rubbed a lot of people wrong, who weren't getting money like that but struggling along. Also, as much as everyone turns this into a straight good vs. evil McScrooge thing, we are fiscally on a cliff due to all the runaway debt our Federal government was running up for the decade and a half before the pandemic. It's not like all of these Santa Claus bills don't have a huge cost. In particular, Jeff Gundlach (Doubleline Capital) was doing one of his periodic webinars last night, and he had two graphs: One showing that our debt to GDP levels are like a straight moonshot now, and beyond what the country did during WII, and then a graph showing that the marginal benefit of the spending is falling hard to the point that every dollar of government spending now is only giving us 30 cents of aggregate economic growth. Yet, we still owe the dollar plus whatever interest for it.