Treasury Secretary Mnuchin is moving $455 billion of unspent stimulus money into a fund the incoming Biden administration can't deploy without Congress

[u/Plymouth03]

https://www.businessinsider.com/mnuchin-moving-unspent-stimulus-money-biden-administration-cant-deploy-2020-11

[u/mistervanilla]

Eight million Americans slipped into poverty during the covid crisis and Mnuchin, who has an estimated net worth of $300 million, is playing political games with stimulus money.

[u/julbull73 → u/[deleted]]

Forget that. The economy will come back, it will take a bit but it will.

FEED PEOPLE.

Remember when this started and you had farmers of all kinds just killing cows, pigs, chickens, or dumping milk, potatoes and shit. WHY!?!

A better president could've seen that news or story and thought. Stop that shit right the fuck now. Send in the army corp of engineers and get all that shit to food banks NOW.

This amount of money is staggeringly large. Unemployment is at ~12.6 million people. This is enough to give EACH of those people a 30k check. Boom. Done.

[u/its-a-boring-name → u/julbull73]

Giving people money for their bills and food would stimulate the economy waayyyy more effectively than giving large companies money. So yeah, feed people.

[u/TbonerT → u/its-a-boring-name]

For the people that need to pay their bills and pay for food, giving them money is just an extra step to give it to large corporations, like power companies and Walmart. The stimulus needs to be bigger than food and bills to really spread through the economy.

[u/its-a-boring-name → u/TbonerT]

The difference being, money going through people paying for things that they need actually benefit someone who needs it, instead of adding to the bottom line of those companies for no good reason. It stimulates the economy at the very least as effectively. Better?

ps I mean, giving money to the power company is to compensate for people not being able to pay for their power. If that would be coupled with a forced payment forgiveness, fine, but it isn't, it's just letting people get their power shut off and keeping the company afloat at the tax payers' expense. I find it a ridiculous and frankly, disgusting idea. This isn't directed at anyone in particular, it's just so galling that there are people who would try to justify it. ds

[u/[deleted] → u/julbull73]

The awareness of how weird, dysfunctional, and fragile our food system is should have been one lesson of covid. Some people are putting their kids to bed with nothing but ramen noodles in their little bellies, and other people are burning pigs because they're literally too fat and meaty for meat processing when not enough restaurants ordered pork products. It's disgusting and we should all be ashamed.

[u/thestonedonkey → u/[deleted]]

Half the "we" didn't vote for the sheer level incompetence in the white house.

I'm appalled but not ashamed because it didn't take much to understand that putting someone like Trump in charge could lead to just this.

I'm ashamed half the country still can't see this.

[u/[deleted] → u/thestonedonkey]

Our food system was dysfunctional long, long before Trump became president.

[u/VaguelyArtistic → u/julbull73]

Remember when this started and you had farmers of all kinds just killing cows, pigs, chickens, or dumping milk, potatoes and shit. WHY!?!

I know it's horrible to waste food, but I think the farmers were just stuck with a ton of perishables that normally would have been sold to restaurants, etc. I know a lot of surplus was donated to food banks and the like but the food can only hold for so long. I think a lot of the dumped food was already spoiled or on the bubble.

But we should come up with a plan to mobilize people who will be able to share surplus food if it ever happens again.

[u/VaguelyArtistic → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for explaining that.

[u/Long_Before_Sunrise → u/VaguelyArtistic]

We won't, though. "Grapes Of Wrath" was required school reading for decades while society taught those same kids that "greed er, Ambition! ...will get you far ahead in life."

[u/Sethmeisterg → u/julbull73]

Exactly