Pandemic-related unemployment assistance ran out last night, and it’s all thanks to this motherfucker right here.
Because of the tantrum that Donald Trump’s been throwing all week, refusing to sign the covid-19 stimulus package that passed with nearly unanimous support in both houses of Congress earlier this past week, the additional benefits intended to help unemployed and self-employed people make ends meet amidst the ongoing economic downturn expired at midnight, NBC News reports. Those weekly payments of $114 to $357 were “a lifeline” for the more than 7 million American who’d lost work due to the coronavirus pandemic, and now they’re gone.
The nearly 5,600-page bill is apparently sitting unsigned at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida estate, in case this asshole decides to change his mind. Earlier this week, he indicated that he might sign it if lawmakers raise direct payments to qualifying American adults from $600 to $2,000 and cut some of what he’s calling “pork,” i.e., super routine foreign aid payments that the United States makes every year. But would he actually sign the bill though if Congress made the changes he wanted? Who fucking knows, honestly. But because of Trump’s inaction on the bill, a whole bunch of bad shit might happen, from a horrifying rise in foreclosures, hunger, and homelessness as well as a full-on government shutdown beginning on Tuesday.
“Foreclosures, hunger, homelessness, suicide,” Michele Evermore, a senior policy analyst for the National Employment Law Project, told The New York Times. “There will be very permanent things that happen to people that can’t be fixed by a check in three weeks.”