US CONGRESS WARNED : STIMULUS PACKAGES MAKE POOR POORER

Economists have warned that a topsy-turvy stimulus package, the last of which is getting incinerated by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, will benefit the billionaires and the elites, weaken the small business sector and repeat the mistakes committed during the 2007-2009 Great Recession caused by manipulation and greed in the stock market, warned Joesph Zeballos-Roig in an article written for the Business Insider on May 31, 2020.

"We're going to have a really imbalanced recovery where large businesses recover pretty quickly, and regular people don't," said Amanda Fischer, policy director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “Larger firms, meanwhile, are able to access a $454 billion bailout fund managed by the Treasury Department as well as the Federal Reserve's lending facilities, so they can prop themselves up. While the aid from Treasury comes with a few strings attached on limiting compensation boosts for executives, the same can't be said for help from the Fed,”

Roig added.

"There are no constraints on buybacks, dividends or executive pay," Robert Reich, former labor secretary during the administration of US President Bill Clinton, told Business Insider. "Those subsidized loans could easily end up in the pockets of extraordinarily rich people and there’s no reason to think anything will trickle down." Reich said the $600 weekly boost in unemployment payments and the one-time $1,200 stimulus checks under the CARES Act may help, but notes it's not enough to tide people over meaningfully. "In implementation, it turns out people have not gotten very much," he told Business Insider. "The real question here is how much money will be trickling down to average working people."

There are also calls for the government to guarantee zero-interest loans for small businesses that could be repaid over several years. There are risks of a backlash if the recovery is uneven as it was in the 2010s. The recovery after the Great Recession was highly unequal. From 2009 to 2017, US households in the top 1% reaped nearly 49% of the income growth, according to an analysis by Emmanuel Saez, a progressive economist at the University of California, Berkeley, Roig stressed.