White House says stimulus checks “worked very well”

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has been one of the main voices we have heard from the White House with respect to the next stimulus package.

His comments haven’t always been clearly positive but it looks like based on the last statement he provided that the White House is taking more serious consideration to another round of stimulus checks.

And not just that, but they are also looking at tailoring the stimulus checks in a way that will cut out certain aspects of the HEROES Act.

“We’re going to seriously consider whether we need to do more direct payments,” Mnuchin told reporters on Thursday. “Worked very well.”

The fact that he reiterated that the stimulus checks worked very well is pretty huge as we have not seen a lot of direct acknowledgment that the checks were successful in accomplishing what they were supposed to do.

Most conservatives continuously stated that they would want to adopt a “wait and see” approach before agreeing to more funding for Americans.

Basically, they wanted to make sure that the checks were doing what they were supposed to do which was stimulate the economy and help out Americans in need.

So the fact that the White House just confirmed that the checks worked is pretty huge.

But Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also stressed that more stimulus payments would only be sent to “legal Americans.”

This is when things may get a little bit tricky with the current state of the HEROES Act.

Unlike the first round, the payments under the HEROES Act will not require people to have a Social Security number and will be available to those with Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) and their families.

So it’s possible that more than 4.3 million adults and 3.5 million children will be eligible compared to the first round of checks, according to ITEP.

It’s still not clear to me exactly how the immigration status would factor into these changes but I’m sure it will be a point of contention.

I think these comments give us a glimpse of the modifications that Republicans are planning on making to the second round of stimulus checks.

They also will likely be looking to trim other perks contained in the stimulus package like student loan forgiveness if I had to guess.

So the things to be on the lookout for in the next couple of weeks are what items will be dropped or modified since I have a feeling there will be several.

H/T

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