Another stimulus check may never come, and one reason for this is the lack of consensus among lawmakers. However, going forward, the process to get approval for stimulus checks could get relatively easier. It is possible that President Biden could make future coronavirus stimulus checks automatic, meaning it wouldn’t require voting for approval.
Q2 2021 hedge fund letters, conferences and more
Congress approved the first stimulus checks last year in March. However, the lawmakers took more than eight months to approve the second stimulus checks. Even for the third round of stimulus checks, the Democrats had to use the reconciliation process to approve the American Rescue Plan.
If Democrats hadn’t used that process, it would have been almost impossible to approve the third round of stimulus checks. This is something that many don’t want to happen again, and thus, they are requesting that Biden make stimulus checks dependent on the needs of the country.
This means the stimulus checks would kick in automatically if certain economic parameters were to trigger. For instance, stimulus checks would start going out if the unemployment rate drops below a certain limit, and stop once the rate goes above that level.
Those in support of the idea argue that such a feature would assure families that they would get continued support to pay their basic bills in case of a pandemic.
Who All Supports The Idea Of Automatic Stabilizers?
A few months back, 26 Democrats sent a letter to the White House requesting them to make future payments automatic. Since then, many more Congress members have come up in support of this feature, called “automatic stabilizers.”
One such letter came from Congressman Andrew Gomez, who stressed the importance of making future payments automatic.
“Tying recurring direct cash payments and federal unemployment benefits to the country’s economic conditions not only makes sense, but it also shows the American people that their government is prepared to help them in the event of another economic catastrophe,” Gomez said in the letter.
In May, the Economic Security Project talked about automatic stabilizers with 50 staff members from the Senate Finance Committee. Moreover, the organization also had a talk with the Biden administration, and was hoping that the president would include it either in the American Families Plan or the American Jobs Plan.
President Biden, however, is yet to address the calls for making future stimulus checks automatic. In fact, Biden hasn’t even talked about giving another stimulus check. Rather, the White House and Democrats are focusing on another kind of stimulus payments, the temporary expansion of the child tax credit.
Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office also doesn’t seem to favor the idea of automatic stabilizers. As per the reports, the Congressional Budget Office, which scores legislative proposals depending on how they impact the federal budget, believes that such stabilizer payments would have an enormous cost.
