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The CARES Act and
Beyond
The coronavirus crisis has now
eliminated over 22
million jobs—about the same amount created in the
decade since the Great Recession. The CARES Act’s Paycheck Protection
Program, meanwhile, is falling
behind, running
dry, and failing to reach the hardest-hit workers
and small businesses—problems one-off stimulus checks and unwieldy
loans won’t
be able to solve. In a New York Times
op-ed, corporate
bailout watchdog (and Roosevelt’s new
managing director of corporate power) Bharat Ramamurti
suggests the path forward: “The Congressional Oversight Commission,
which I was appointed to by the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer,
last week, is the only body that can investigate the decisions made by
the Treasury and the Fed without interference from President Trump,
who has already tampered with the two other oversight bodies [that]
the CARES Act created. The public’s best hope is for Congress to
quickly appoint the other four commissioners and let us get to work on
the behalf of taxpayers, tracking the more than $2 trillion in lending
that is already in the pipeline.” Read
more, and listen to Ramamurti’s conversation with
Vox’s Matthew Yglesias on the latest
episode of The Weeds.
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Loans are not enough:
“Both Republicans and Democrats are now recognizing that
loans may be insufficient and have called for direct subsidies to
small businesses. This public-health crisis can avoid becoming a
full-scale economic crisis through smart government action to keep
businesses whole,” Roosevelt Fellow Lenore Palladino writes
for Barron’s.
As Roosevelt President & CEO Felicia Wong tells
The Progressive in an
interview, Congress
can do more: “The federal government can
absolutely afford to provide cash
backstops . . . to those in need. We can mandate
paid sick leave for all workers. We can extend unemployment
insurance benefits. We can expand health insurance
coverage and put in motion public production of basic
medicines. In fact, given the amount of wealth in this country
that could be put to better public use, we can’t afford not to do
these things.” For Boston Review, Wong
explains why
wealth taxation is central to creating the new
progressive economy we need.
- The crisis ahead: “COVID-19
and the economic collapse it has caused have laid bare how connected
our problems are,” Roosevelt Director of Climate Policy Rhiana
Gunn-Wright writes for the New York Times’s series on a
post-pandemic economy. “Refusing to include measures related to
climate and environmental justice in economic stimulus packages
related to the coronavirus is not neutral when there is no guarantee
of other opportunities to do so later. We need to design the stimulus
not only to help the US economy recover but to also become more
resilient to the climate crisis, the next multitrillion-dollar crisis
headed our way.” Read
on.
 Rethinking Financial
Inclusion
An
early lesson from the CARES Act’s stilted
stimulus disbursement: Digital access to payment
systems should be a public good. In a new paper, Roosevelt Fellow
Mehrsa Baradaran explains how historical policy choices created
today’s exclusionary financial and credit services—and how we can
design a more equal system with democracy and public policy.
“Financial exclusion is a result of policy decisions that have
centered bank credit as a principal means of access; financial
redesign—not new technologies at the margins—can remedy the problem by
changing the paradigm,” Baradaran writes. “Like moving from gold to
silver, a change in the legal foundations of credit and financial
policy can create a more just and equitable economy.” Read
the full report, and learn more about how postal
banking can boost access in
a new blog post from Roosevelt Senior Manager of
Media Strategies Ariela Weinberger.
 How to Rescue the
Economy
“There is a whole lot we need to do to pull
our country out of this public health and economic calamity. But if
there is one shared understanding I hope we can emerge from this
crisis with, it’s this: We are the economy,” Roosevelt Fellow and
Groundwork Collaborative Executive Director Michael
Linden writes
for Buzzfeed. “The economy is not the stock
market, or the bottom lines of a handful of massive corporations. The
economy is the nurses, grocery store workers, warehouse and
construction workers, and so many other workers and families. And when
they aren’t prospering, the economy isn’t strong.” For Crooked Media,
Linden lists the four
keys to a successful coronavirus response for all,
and in a Washington Post op-ed, Suzanne Kahn—deputy director
of the Great Democracy Initiative and a Roosevelt education
expert—explores what
Congress can learn from the New Deal. For
the blog, Roosevelt Network National Director
Katie Kirchner argues that college students and young
adults, many
of whom were excluded from stimulus funding, need
targeted support in future relief
efforts.
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