Mitt Romney Thinks Every American Adult Should Get $1,000 During The Coronavirus Outbreak (buzzfeednews.com) 264
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to hit the US, people nationwide are being encouraged to stay inside their homes and states and cities are beginning to close restaurants, bars, and other businesses. Utah Sen. Mitt Romney has a plan he thinks can help: Give every adult in the US $1,000. From a report: "Every American adult should immediately receive $1,000 to help ensure families and workers can meet their short-term obligations and increase spending in the economy," a press release from Romney said Monday. "Congress took similar action during the 2001 and 2008 recessions. While expansions of paid leave, unemployment insurance, and SNAP benefits [the program formally known as food stamps] are crucial, the check will help fill the gaps for Americans that may not quickly navigate different government options." The proposal to give every adult $1,000 is one of several put forth by Romney to try and address the pandemic, and was central to businessman Andrew Yang's Democratic presidential campaign. Yang, who qualified for several debates before exiting the race last month, ran a campaign almost entirely focused on a universal basic income proposal that would give every American adult $1,000 per month. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, another Democrat running for president, has also called for all Americans to receive $1,000 per month for the remainder of the coronavirus crisis.
So what he has to offer then is... (Score:5, Funny)
....binders full of cash.
NOT a meaningful solution approach (Score:3)
....binders full of cash.
You deserve the funny mod, but it's also insightful. If I cared about Romney I'd check to see if he at least gave proper credit to Andrew Yang (who was my preferred candidate).
Here is my latest solution approach, but I need to apologize in advance because this is mostly a cut-and-paste from a Slashdot discussion that has already expired. I should rewrite it from scratch, but that would require too much time and effort, especially considering the current state of Slashdot... I'm just going to edit and massag
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Just raise the government debt limit. Then it'll become some future person's problem.
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It's never necessary to pay it off; but it's necessary to stop it becoming an overbearing fraction of the governments budget.
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If I get $1K for 4 months...I'll have enough there to buy the new Canon R5 camera when it gets released!!!
I wonder...can I still write it off as a business expense?
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If I get $1K for 4 months...
To be clear: Mitt is proposing a ONE TIME payment of $1k.
It is not a continuing monthly payment.
I wonder...can I still write it off as a business expense?
Of course. Why would the source of the money make any difference?
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The crisis will never end.
This is the primary issue with that statement.
I don't disagree we need to spread some federal funding because federal mandates have said everyone needs to be home.
We are trading lives for the economy and we should recognize that. Otherwise, it would be business as normal except for the %4 population drop off.
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They'd get paid in ordnance. Only targeted explosive ordnance, if they're lucky. The 600 pound gorilla may be poor on paper, but he'll still flatten your ass if you piss him off enough.
Re:So what he has to offer then is... (Score:5, Informative)
They're not callable loans.
Re: So what he has to offer then is... (Score:2, Insightful)
Neither does your interest. Or corporate valuation. Or stock value.
And if we count those, I heard The Bezos from planet Bezos got some trillion lying of that makebelieve money lying around. Give everyone $100 from that, and he still got 70% of it! Can't buy enough shit trough burn through that in a thousand of our normal human lifetimes.
Or... how much were those tax breaks for the rich (What The Actual Fuck, America!) again?
Or how much military industry pork that the actual military doesn't even want? (Abou
I meant: Give everyone $1000! Not $100! (Score:2)
Sorry. Submitted too early.
$1e12 / 327,167,434 inhabitants = 3056.538934128 $/inhabitant
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That is Federal Income Taxes. You have to add on Social Security and Medicare taxes, state taxes, local taxes. I pay nearly 50% and my income is barely 6 figures. If you account for sales taxes, property taxes and the ton of other surcharges and fees to the government, I pay close to 75% in taxes. This is all to offset the huge amount of people that pay negative income taxes.
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Oh Jesus Christ. I agree the stupid twitter "Rich people don't pay taxes!" bullshit is getting old. Of course they do, and they pay more both as an amount and as a percentage than the people crying.
However, you don't pay close to 75 fucking %. Jesus Christ, you don't even pay 50% once you include all of those taxes.
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And...that's why we have guns.
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Deserves a positive mod point, but you should have mentioned the guns...
My solution approach is included elsewhere in the discussion, but I'd add that my weird twofer could justify paying to send the transitioned people "on vacation" to disinfect those nice places, too. There's another equilibrium point, this time involving real and paid vacationers, but again we can't get there from here.
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On behalf of all my fellow preppers: "We told you so."
I've already got everything I need.
Even toilet paper.
Re:So what he has to offer then is... (Score:5, Insightful)
If only some thoughtful economist had proposed saving money during booms so there would be money to spend during a recession.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It’s too bad we elected Hillary. She squandered a booming economy with burdensome tariffs, gave a giant tax cut to bankers, and ballooned the deficit right before a national emergency. Damn those tax-and-spend Democrats.
I’m glad she gutted the pandemic response team, though. Preparedness costs money in the short term, and never saves money down the road. I mean, it might, but we’d need to do math more complicated than counting to find out, and we all know that counting is all that counts. Extrapolation is for communists.
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What's a republican? A democrat that learned how to count.
As an illustration, where should these 327billion dollars per month come from? Right. Nowhere, they don't exist, specially considering the federal gov income is going to plummet during the same period.
Pathetic.
So you take a crack at people not knowing how to count, and then promptly miscount the number of adults in the country?
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one time 1000 credit != yang's UBI scheme (Score:3)
You'd think that would be obvious but I guess it isn't.
Romney the stealth progressive (Score:5, Interesting)
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now he's advocating UBI?
He's not. UBI has nothing to do with a short term cash stimulus. Please learn the difference.
Re:Romney the stealth progressive (Score:4, Insightful)
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As opposed to the current dominant wing of the Republican Party, the LTEC wing, or "Let Them Eat Cake" wing.
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Re:Romney the stealth progressive (Score:4, Insightful)
To paraphrase Walter Sobchak, at least Fascism is an ethos. The only ethos I see with the Republicans is "Don't make the base mad." The cart is pulling the donkey these days.
Re:Romney the stealth progressive (Score:5, Informative)
The cart is pulling the elephant these days.
FTFY. You can't just accidentally mix your metaphors like that.
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Too late. Has the stock market hit the second circuit breaker yet today?
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If only that were true. Most Americans want only modest limitations on abortion, and yet vast swathes of the Republican Party act as if banning abortion is an expression of the will of voters. Political parties don't function as some sort of representation of the will of voters. They function as representatives of their own political base. At best, it means parties use dog whistle politics with no intention of actually enacting what their base wants (in other words, they are lying to their base), at worst t
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Reagan wanted to let in more immigrants, and granted amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants. Who is a RINO now, bud? Be sure to tell all your older friends, Reagan was a no-good liberal. That'll go well.
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I guarantee he wouldn't. And neither would Eisenhower, Nixon, or Ford, and I'm guessing George H. W. Bush doesn't either.
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There is a name for what Romney and McCain were... RINO.
RINO used to be an insult. I would say now that it's a badge of honor. At the very least it signifies a willingness to not compromise your values.
Wouldn't... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sure that could help some people if they could get it right now, but over a few months wouldn't that just serve to devalue the US dollar?
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Considering every other currency on the planet is either currently taking a beating, or about to, do you really imagine the greenback is going to fall in value compared to other currencies?
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They just injected a trillion + into the stock market. This would be less than half of that.
Re:Wouldn't... (Score:5, Informative)
SIgh, They did not just inject a trillion into the stock market. The made LOANS in that amount; REPO loans by the way that have to be collateralized.
Its not like the FED is passing out free money. In fact the banks could thru fractional reserve lending create that money supply on their own and they usually do, one bank with excess reserves lends cash to one that needs to meet capital requirements. However when the banks stop trusting each other that system breaks down. It had. When that happens they stop being able to originate commercial loans and companies can no longer roll over debt. When that happens the wheels come off because a decade of cheap money has left corporate balance sheets with just stupid debt to equity ratios.
Now you can argue that because prime rates are now 0ish banks can just roll debt forever so it is like new free money. That is true until rates creep back up if they do.. However they probably will because Central Banks need a monetary policy tool which they now havent got. So eventually the bill will come due and some badly run banks will fail but at an orderly rate. Yes its unfair but we are at a point now where the wheels fall off otherwise so - yes these aholes get paid a nice salary run their insolvent institutions for a few more months.
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Don't know, why not look at examples around the world such as in Australia when they did it to provide stimulus to the economy in the middle of a financial crisis avoiding a recession and at the same time strengthening the value of the dollar against foreign currencies.
The budget deficit in the USA is already just shy of $1 trillion / year. Just looking at historical graphs of the US dollar vs all other major currencies it's clear that simply overspending does not devalue the dollar and that the economy on
Yeah, it's a loan in a crisis (Score:2)
Yeah, whether in the form of inflation or some other way, it'll need to be paid back. Given that a lot of people are very temporarily unemployed or underemployed, that's probably reasonable. They'll probably be back to work a month from now, and some pent-up demand may even spike the economy a bit.
That's on a macro, whole-economy level. Of course the pay back will hit different people differently. Probably those who HAVE money, savers and more educated / trained people earning at least average wage, will
Re:Wouldn't... (Score:5, Interesting)
Giving each American adult $1000 would cost about $200 billion and likely help the economy a lot more than handing it over to the bankers with the QE money. I vehemently oppose a UBI and even I think this hand-out is a great idea. Even doing it monthly until this outbreak is resolved.
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Free money (Score:5, Informative)
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Right now, they don't. Any government that institutes an austerity program at the moment is going to turn this crisis into a catastrophe.
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Re:Free money (Score:4, Informative)
Because Romney thinks deficits don't matter [axios.com], right?
Well two things about that:
a) America on the whole thinks deficits don't matter. That much is clear from the incredible deficit they have been running for the incredible length they've been going for.
b) Deficits are only a part of an overall economic equation. Injecting a large stimulus into the economy can have a much greater benefit than the negative implications of the deficit required to do so. The USA wouldn't be giving money away for nothing in return. That money invariably results in boosting the local economy and they are far from the only country looking at doing so.
They complain tax breaks don't help (Score:2)
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Tax breaks help people who pay taxes (Score:2)
Tax breaks reduce the burden on those who actually pay taxes.
"Free money" transfers money from those who work and pay taxes to those who don't, so liberals much prefer the latter.
Conservatives don't want to create permanent dependence, they do know the difference between one-time help in a crisis vs creating a permanently dependent class, so they are fine with a one-time thing.
Kinda like the big cornona virus bill - conservatives supporter a bill covering all the things needed to handle this crisis; Pelosi
Re: Tax breaks help people who pay taxes (Score:4, Insightful)
The *goal* is to make sure that those who are currently out of work have money to keep the economy moving.
The fundamental view-point difference in this one is that republicans typically see people who have crap jobs, or no job as lazy bums who are sponging off everyone else. Meanwhile, the democrats typically see them as hard working people who are desperate to find *some* job that will pay them enough to live on, and that their bosses are the spongers who are chronically under-paying them.
In this instance, itâ(TM)s clear that the employees are not the spongers - lots of people who were working hard and paying taxes have been told âoeto home, donâ(TM)t spread it aroundâ. Thus, even the republicans are saying âoethese people really donâ(TM)t deserve to lose their house over something completely out of their control.â
Right, though exaggerated (Score:2)
Right, though exaggerated. Plus the new element of the Democrat party says it doesn't *matter* whether people work hard or if they are rhe lazy - they should get the same results either way. Aka Democratic socialism.
Obviously neither group thinks everyone who is broke is working their ass off, or thinks they are all lazy or all making bad decisions. But each party tends to focus more on one or the other. Democrats tend toward give a man a dish, Republicans tend toward teach a man to fish.
I tend toward,
Re:They complain tax breaks don't help (Score:4, Insightful)
But they are willing to give cash?
They are absolutely right. The economic results and the longer implications of a tax break has a very different result from a short term stimulus payment. Cash payments one off tend to go to short term expenses directly bolstering the immediate economy, and are much cheaper and orders of magnitude more instantaneous in effect on the social system than a tax break.
A tax break would achieve precisely nothing that the government is proposing this cash payment do.
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And trump wants to cut SNAP / make people work (Score:2)
And trump wants to cut SNAP / make people work to get it.
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Mar. 12, 2020
You're right, "you didn't think." The people who have actual trump derangement syndrome are the cultists who follow this pussy grabby narcissistic lying piece of shit no matter what he does, and dismiss any criticism as just disliking the guy.
This fucking lying sack of shit has minimized this virus outbreak, and caused his cult followers to think that it's not a problem. Interestingly, his cult followers are predominantly the people who are most severely affected by it.
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And trump wants to cut SNAP / make people work to get it.
Most conservatives don't like SNAP because of the permanence of it. Which is why they add rules like you can only collect it for 2 years or you have to be looking for a job. This would be a one time check to help people and to help stimulate the economy. No chance of someone getting dependent on it. Also seems like a better use of funds than giving money to the hotel or airline industry to stick in a bank somewhere.
"This will never be a socialist country" (Score:2)
"This will never be a socialist country"
Someone said that. (45)
I know that Mitt isn't his best friend, but a conservative 'R' he is, and THIS is a socialistic idea. So is "free" corona testing - it isn't free, society pays and that is socialism. I bet that conservative MAGA hat wearing people will be all in favor of socialism when they find themselves in line for covid treatment. Long insurance forms to fill out first? No, just treat me, the government should cover it. Yea, socialism.
Re:"This will never be a socialist country" (Score:5, Insightful)
America has collectively forgotten what socialism means. Now it's nothing but a convenient term to describe any spending you don't like, especially if it's on people you don't like.
Goose and gander (Score:2)
America has collectively forgotten what socialism means. Now it's nothing but a convenient term to describe any spending you don't like, especially if it's on people you don't like.
I know, I know!
Just like racist used to mean something specific, and now it's just a convenient term to describe any political decision you don't like.
Or how "OK boomer" morphed into "OK doomer" to describe climate change proponents. They hated that one *a lot*.
English is pliable, and what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
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Romney's idea my ass. (Score:4, Insightful)
Andrew Yang literally ran on the idea of the $1000/month plan as a form of permanent UBI during his run.
Then Tulsi Gabbard (another presidential candidate) doubled down on that idea, stating we need to institute an emergency UBI plan due to this outbreak.
How in the FUCK did Mitt Romney end up getting his name associated with this "new" idea? FFS, no wonder people still think Al Gore invented the internet.
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Because this is highly unusual coming from a Republican and it's also not the same thing as a UBI. This is a one time payment not an ongoing dependency. Obama did something similar and cut a bunch of checks of $250 each to everyone on social security in 2009.
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Andrew Yang literally ran on the idea of the $1000/month plan as a form of permanent UBI during his run.
Fortunately this is neither UBI, nor is it a monthly payment. So very much has nothing at all to do with Yang's idea, and isn't even remotely related in purpose to Yang's idea.
Economic stimulus wasn't invented with the idea of UBI, and unlike UBI has been used all over the world many times.
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Andrew Yang literally ran on the idea of the $1000/month plan as a form of permanent UBI during his run.
Fortunately this is neither UBI, nor is it a monthly payment. So very much has nothing at all to do with Yang's idea, and isn't even remotely related in purpose to Yang's idea.
No, but it is exactly Tulsi Gabbards idea of a temporary stimulus, so again, how the hell did Mitt Romney get associated with this? Just when you thought candidates couldn't get any more dismissed by the MSM. What a joke.
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You don't need an "idea" to say "let's give everyone some cash to stimulate our economy".
Uh, that is an idea, unless you have some weird-ass definition for that word. And it certainly does help to prove the idea would actually stimulate the economy when history has shown differently.
Mitt Romney is getting credit for saying this because he's from Republican.
You know how much the virus itself cares about political lines? Yeah, that's about how much give-a-shit I have for coloring this blue or red.
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This stuff is super helpful in crisis times. We're all proud of you.
This isn't a UBI (Score:2)
It's a good idea. The closures and drop in activity (aside from raiding supermarket supplies) means many people's incomes have dropped or ceased entirely. But they still need to buy food, pay the bills, etc. I'm sure most of them don't keep a 3-6 month emergency fund like economists advise you to do. So the money wo
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You underestimate how much money the government prints and how often the dollar is inflated by other means. How else do you think the country gets into $23 trillion in debt? $210 billion wouldn't even make a dramatic difference in our annual budget deficit.
That is, if it's a one-time payment.
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You underestimate how much money the government prints and how often the dollar is inflated by other means. How else do you think the country gets into $23 trillion in debt? $210 billion wouldn't even make a dramatic difference in our annual budget deficit.
That is, if it's a one-time payment.
It won't be a one-time payment. It will be one of 6 payments, because that's how many months we can expect this to drag out, especially after we start testing in the US, and find we have 100x more infections than previously assumed.
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Depends on which proposal you were talking about. One of them was a one-time payment.
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No. This is a minuscule amount of money in comparison to the stimulus that has been used in attempts to prop up the stock market during this crash. It would have no effect on inflation whatsoever.
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Won't work. (Score:2)
Instead what would need to be done is giving out gift cards with a very short expiration date, say two months. If they were to get a lots of stores, mainly brick and mortar, throw in some pre-paid credit cards and randomly distribute them you would have a solution. for $1000 you would need to send each person 10 cards wort
Re:Won't work. (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would most people not spend it on rent and food? Especially the people who live paycheck to paycheck and have lost their incomes because of the pandemic? I mean, those are the people this is meant for, ordinary Americans. I don't see how trying to micromanage which stores they can spend the money at would make things better. That would add a huge layer of bureaucracy, cost overhead and inefficiency if they get gift cards for something they don't need.
Myself I don't need this money so I would probably donate it to the food lifeline or some such. But I'm not under the impression I'm "most people".
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
"Increase spending" (Score:2)
Not "keep people safe".
You only want to keep your profits up, ya cheeky cunt! *Malcolm Tucker noises (swearing)*
Great con job opener though. "Free money". Classic. Always a winner.
And using this for your gain is not below your moral standards, we all know that
Like Mitt Rmoney, kingpin of a vulture capital (= corporate pimp) company, cares about anythig else anyway.
Who Pays for the $1000 Handout? (Score:2, Interesting)
How about they divert funds from pork-barrel projects like the SLS that will never launch this decade and use those billions on "corona income relief"?
What we DON'T need right now are new taxes. What we DO need is for the money we've paid in taxes to be spent better.
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You pay for it now, or you pay for it later. This "fuck the poor" mentality is what lead to Louis XVI's date with Madame Guillotine. American individualism is by and large a fantasy, a lovely Protestant myth retold countless times, even as every person in the United States enjoys the standard of living they do because of government action.
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Could we have this in ... (Score:2)
Oh, and 5.56 NATO.
Fuck off. (Score:3)
Remember that massive bailout years back that could've instead put $20,000 in the pocket of every American at a lower cost?
Mitt? (Score:2)
He must be OK, he's one of these preppers who have a 1 year food supply for every person in the household, also known as 'Mormons'.
They must be thrilled right now.
What a dumb*ss! (Score:2)
And in 6 months... (Score:2)
Few seem to consider the constancy of such programs/ideas.
Joking matter (Score:2)
I was gonna joke this $1000 will only cost the average American $1200. However it will be completely borrowed, and never paid back, so will cost your kids and grandkids and so on tens of thousands through all eternity.
The math does not lie.
Mitt Romney, humble peanut farmer (Score:2)
Remember when Jimmy Carter lost an election by making this specific promise? Democrats used to be the party that built stuff, and the Republicans used to be the party of fiscal responsibility.
This was NOT a Yang idea (Score:3)
The proposal to give every adult $1,000 is one of several put forth by Romney to try and address the pandemic, and was central to businessman Andrew Yang's Democratic presidential campaign.
Romney is proposing a one time payment of $1,000 to help during this crisis. Yang's proposal was $1,000 EVERY MONTH FOREVER!. Other that both of these proposals having the nice, big, round number of $1,000 in them, they are completely unrelated, and the author of this article is a moron for suggesting otherwise.
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You know, there's actually a reason that everyone decided the Articles of Confederation were inadequate and that a strong Federal government was a requirement of a stable and productive union of the several states.
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The problem with that argument is that the strong federal government has quickly become an overbearing one. Maybe we should revisit some of the ideas in the Articles of Confederation and make a compromise that gives us a federal government that's has less power to abuse. If we can reclaim some of the States' autonomy that was lost under the current interpretation of the Constitution but have more incentive to maintain the integrity of the union than the Articles conferred, then maybe we could have that mo
Re: Any way they can think of to tank the economy (Score:2)
I mean they're on the news comparing annual flu numbers vs. O only a couple months of coronavirus. Comparison is so incongruent it's laughable. Morons don't know how to compare timeframes vs. Numbers and % vs. Totals.
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Mitt clearly learned nothing from George W Bush during the 2008 economic collapse. Giving people free money checks does not stimulate the economy or avert a crash. Every single person who got one of those $700 Bush-era checks immediately paid off their credit cards or deposited it into a savings account. nobody bought a new ipad or a TV, or whatever wishful thinking the GOP was running on at the time.
Even if they bought a new consumer goods they are mostly made in China. So we borrowed money from China to give some people to buy stuff from China. It's nuts.
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Mitt clearly learned nothing from George W Bush during the 2008 economic collapse. Giving people free money checks does not stimulate the economy or avert a crash. Every single person who got one of those $700 Bush-era checks immediately paid off their credit cards or deposited it into a savings account. nobody bought a new ipad or a TV, or whatever wishful thinking the GOP was running on at the time.
Even if they bought a new consumer goods they are mostly made in China. So we borrowed money from China to give some people to buy stuff from China. It's nuts.
I'm sorry, but we're a country that's well over $20 trillion in debt already, so how the hell does your statement here not describe business as usual...
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Every single person who got one of those $700 Bush-era checks immediately paid off their credit cards or deposited it into a savings account. nobody bought a new ipad or a TV, or whatever wishful thinking the GOP was running on at the time.
Would buying high-margin electronics really help the economy as a whole? $700 going straight to credit cards or savings accounts is at least a bank bailout by another name.
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It was widely seen a bribe to working class americans on their way to losing homes and jobs in 2008/2009 and a last-ditch effort to keep Bush in office after he spent 8 trillion dollars on TARP money for rich people, while largely attributing the housing crisis to personal irresponsibility.
?
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Guns, weed, hookers. That still contributes to the overall GDP. No one is setting $1000 on fire, the money invariably stimulates the economy.
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Hmm...so we're going to give every gang member too $1000? I guess that will do wonders for the gun industry. What about the crack heads, meth users, etc. Gee, I wonder where they'll spend the money.
Hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of jobs are sustained every year by putting opium in a pill bottle.
When it comes to that impact you're so worried about, try and remember which drug pushers are going to run out first (90% of generic meds come from China.)