The most cynical interpretation — which isn’t to say that it’s wrong — is that Republicans expect to lose power in November. During the early years of the Obama administration, Republicans sabotaged economic stimulus efforts because they thought it would help them return to power. And it worked — although only at the expense of millions of Americans.
T.J.S.: Of course, there is a certain someone — President Trump — who has every reason, if he wants to do all he can to get re-elected, to push Mr. McConnell and other Senate Republicans into passing a package of moderately generous emergency aid extensions through November. But by Trumpian standards, he seems to have barely made a peep.
B.A.: Trump does seem to be sabotaging his own re-election prospects. I’m not going to try to climb inside the president’s head, but I would note that it can be misleading to think of the presidency as a single person sitting there making autonomous decisions. A president is encrusted in advisers who filter what he hears and who inform what he decides. So the reasons for the Senate’s inaction may well apply to the White House too.
T.J.S.: If only we could climb inside the president’s head.
Moving on from the palace intrigue, I recently read a fascinating essay in Barron’s by Matthew Zeitlin. He observes how the $600 weekly payment that Congress approved for the unemployed — many of whom are now bringing in more than they did from their previous jobs — has provided an informal case study of government aid. As he puts it, “even with a limited run, the benefit has provided a wealth of data, insight, and experience that should reshape how we think about unemployment benefits and social policy.”
Because of the benefits these payments have provided to the economy, he says, “they — or something like them — could be a permanent feature of U.S. economic policy.”
It’s definitely bold, and only something elected Democrats, and those to their left, would even consider. But vote-counting aside, what do you make of the ideas he covers in the piece, like wage subsidies or a mini universal basic income on the merits?
B.A.: It’s one of the few things that has gone right since the crisis started. For me, the $600 payments really underscore that we need two different kinds of unemployment benefits, one for normal times and one for bad times. In normal times, the state only replaces a portion of lost wages because we want to encourage people to go back to work. In bad times, when work is hard to find, it makes sense to give people more money. And we could switch automatically between those two kinds of programs based on the level of unemployment.