Bipartisan effort to oust the outsider Trump makes 2nd US stimulus unlikely
We are currently experiencing the biggest era of American division in 50 years, but one thing Americans are united in is that they want additional coronavirus stimulus: a poll last week showed 70% of respondents demand a re-routing of taxes back their way.
The reasons for that are too numerous to list here, but it's not hyperbole to summarise that national economic indicators suggest either "Great Depression II" or "Great Recession-er."
Yet for months Congress has remained deadlocked on concluding a relief plan which would get scores of millions of Americans to back away from the ledge, the bottle, the prescription pill and the daily conversations they are having with each other about their very serious economic desperation and hopelessness.
The coronavirus seems likely to deal a death blow to the neoliberal form of capitalism, which has always been a faith-based ideology with a terrible track record, anyway: in a major crisis a central government simply must provide services and aid, and simply cannot continue to slash itself into neoliberal-ordered nothingness.
While rational American conservatives are slowly coming around on this, the nation's top Republican lawmakers are not.
A comparison of the $3.4 trillion Democrat and the $1.1 trillion Republican stimulus plans shows that the biggest disagreement comes on the core neoliberal and libertarian tenet of eliminating government as much as possible: Democrats want $1.1 trillion earmarked for state and local governments, while Republicans propose just $100 billion. More than a few fiscally-reactionary Republicans think the original $2.2 trillion CARES Act overstepped the absurd limits they set on government, but the vast majority of conservatives in Congress are simply not going to allow the coronavirus to roll back their four decades of efforts to reduce government at all levels.
It should be remembered that in the American federal system local government plays - or used to - a much larger role than in most other countries. The coronavirus also seems likely to deal another death blow - to those who insist on a weak central government: the fragmented and chaotic US response to the pandemic is a direct result of their insistence on "states' rights" over national well-being, which makes a unified response to any type of crisis fundamentally impossible.
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