Mnuchin's failure of imagination?

With the $600/week Covid19 pandemic boost to Unemployment Insurance benefits set to expire in days, Trump's Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin repeatedly emphasizes that it just wouldn't be fair to pay people more to stay home than to go out and get a job. I disagree.

It seems Mr. Mnuchin can't imagine why looking out for THE PEOPLE, rather than the Corporations would be fair.

Mnuchin's unstated premise is that giving people more money than they would receive from a job provides incentive to not work. Wouldn't it have been wonderful for the interviewer to ask what Mnuchin thinks those people do with their time instead of participating in gainful employment? Some of them spend time recovering from Covid19 infections. Some of them take care of their children (a HUGE benefit to America when children actually get loving care from a parent or parents). Some of them may be thinking of creative endeavors. But as the Treasury secretary acknowledges in the video, these people are SPENDING money. And that IS helping the economy.




What Mnuchin is really saying is that he and Trump are not interested in the quality of life of families with children who need human care and contact; and are not interested in so many other things that Americans have been suffering for the last five decades (not limited to just the last five months) or so.

Since the publication of the Powell Manifesto in 1971, the rights of working and Middle Class families have been gradually squeezed beyond breaking points. That is, very much like the analogy of the frog dropped into a pan of room temperature water on a stove and turning on the gas. It has taken half a century to get to the place where we can no longer avoid the realization that we have reached the boiling point.

Mnuchin and Chris Wallace really should have been talking about UBI--Universal Basic Income. Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, dedicated an entire chapter in his book, Utopia for Realists, to UBI.

The fact is that many of the jobs of yesterday and today have been disrupted by technological innovation not necessarily just by covid19. The GOP in the US would rather not deal with it. Instead, they extend former Florida Congressman Alan Greyson's incisive insight from debate over the Affordable Care Act, to what can't be done with or for people whose jobs have simply disappeared, "Die quickly."

From Bregman's book,

A year and a half after the experiment began [a 2009 experiment in London with UBI], seven of the thirteen rough sleepers [homeless persons] had a roof over their heads. Two more were about to move into their own apartments. All thirteen had taken critical steps toward solvency and personal growth. 

They were enrolled in classes, learning to cook, going through rehab, visiting their families, and making plans for the future. “It empowers people,” one of the social workers said about the personalized budget. “It gives choices. I think it can make a difference.” After decades of fruitless pushing, pulling, pampering, penalizing, prosecuting, and protecting, nine notorious vagrants had finally been brought in from the streets. The cost? Some £50,000 a year, including the social workers’ wages. In other words, not only did the project help thirteen people, it also cut costs considerably. Even the Economist had to conclude that the “most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.”

Bregman, Rutger. Utopia for Realists (pp. 26-27). Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition. 

Just like the short-sighted Mnuchin and the Trump administration in general, might I too be too narrowly focused if I were to characterize them as ultimately only concerned about "the economy" rather than the people who spend money to keep the economy going?

The drama and rhetoric from Trump for the last couple of months has been mostly about re-opening schools without addressing the underlying health and safety matters (so parents can go back to work). Thereby performing CPR and pumping oxygen back into "Trump's economy" so it would hopefully be revived. Drama because without a flattened covid curve and addressing underlying  matters, there can be no economic recovery. The premature re-opening of Arizona (and Georgia, Texas and Florida) provide salient evidence of that very point.

I maintain that giving people more money NOW can help families get out from under massive debt and allow them to actually thrive. In the 1990s, I took on two mortgages. The pressure induced anxiety, which limited my productivity. In 2005, the housing bubble rescued me and I sold that home for a gain. The load was lifted off my shoulders. That made all the difference in the world for my mental, physical and financial health.

Of course, it seems too much to ask for Trump and his cabinet ministers to frame their planning, discussions and Congressional negotiations in terms of what is best for the American people.

The way my imagination sees it, at this moment in history, having the House of Representatives controlled by Democrats, may be the only thing keeping us from utter disaster.