Huge week for stimulus negotiations, here’s what to look out for

It’s been a wild year and we are finally nearing the end of 2020 (and hopefully coming to an end for the stimulus saga).

The last nine months have involved countless ups and downs as stimulus talks have gone in all sorts of different directions.

But now we have arrived to what looks like will be the last week of the year for a stimulus bill to pass.

And it is about as important of a week as you could imagine.

If Congress fails to act some of the most important and necessary pandemic benefits will expire this month right around Christmas.

These include expanded unemployment benefits and also the temporary ban on evictions.

To give you a picture of how much of an impact those benefits would have, there are more than 19 million Americans currently receiving jobless benefits and around 13 million of those would lose their benefits right around Christmas.

13 million is a whole lot of people.

And there is no telling on the impact that losing out on these benefits will have on the economy as we roll into a new year.

“If we don’t get that help, [the recent unemployment] report suggests that the economy is going to start backtracking, we’re going to start losing jobs, and unemployment will start rising again,” Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi told Fortune.

So where do things currently stand this week?

It’s essentially still a stalemate.

There is the $908 billion proposal that has gained a lot of momentum over the past few weeks but that seems to have acted more as a foundational framework for negotiations.

In other words, we still have not seen an actual draft of the bill yet.

There is also the $916 billion proposal from the White House which included $600 stimulus checks but left out unemployment benefits which as you just saw above, is a move that would have profound consequences on the public.

For that reason, lawmakers did not seem to get on board.

Then we have to push for stimulus checks which has come from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

Stimulus checks also appear to be supported by President Trump, President elect Biden, economic experts, and also renowned entrepreneurs.

In addition to stimulus checks, the major issues still hanging up negotiations are lawsuit protections for coronavirus related cases for employers and also the funding for state and local governments.

So what is expected to happen with all of these issues?

We’ve heard reports that a draft is expected to be produced by the end of today.

Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin said the bipartisan bill “hasn’t fallen apart,”

“We’ve been meeting day and night for the last month… We’ll have a bill produced for the American people [on Monday], $908 billion… before the end of the day.”

So it will be extremely interesting to see what develops later on today.

The big questions that we will be waiting to get answers on include:

• What will the overall price tag be of the stimulus bill?
• Will it contain more stimulus checks?
• Will it contain liability protections for coronavirus cases?
• What type of aid will go to local governments?

It’s very possible that we could be dealing with a two-part bill as well.

So we might see a bill in the $700 billion range that covers things like unemployment benefits and then a smaller bill later on that could come in with funding for local governments and liability protection.

Perhaps stimulus checks will fall somewhere in the mix?

So stay tuned for updates later today as we should know what exactly lawmakers are going to push for this week.

H/T

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