This. Each party has really fucked this process up. Only partisan hacks would try and argue that their party is pious and pure.

As far as I can tell, the democrats were negotiating in good faith in the senate and the 5 days of talks produced the senate bill with all sorts of conditions and compromises directly related to the coronavirus. It was those negotiations that clarified the amount of money per person, amount per child, how many rounds of payments. They added in clauses to make sure it didn't phase in with rich people getting more than poor ones, and made sure it phased out from $75-99k income. And they added the conditions to the corporate bailout to say a $425k executive pay cap, no stock buybacks and must keep payroll intact.

We have to remember that this entire bill was an overtly socialist proposal to begin with, we had Andrew Yang saluting what was basically a month or two in universal basic income. The republicans were outflanking the democrats on the left. In anything but an extreme crisis, this bill was unthinkable. And they added in reasonable concessions to democrats on top of all that, stuff that really wasn't dealbreakers and had a lot of good sense behind it.

But then Nancy Pelosi showed up on capitol hill, axed the entire process and produced this ideological wishlist garbage that can serve no purpose but obstructionism.

Why hasn't the Defense Production Act been used? Either it's massive incompetence or a failure of messaging because no one seems to know why it isn't being used by Trump.

We have plenty of those here. I will in knowledge that politicians from both parties are scum especially leadership.

The Republican party has made it their business to the reduce the amount of Americans with health care and employment rights For decades now they don't get to act like they're coming into the rescue. And the democrats are always prone to stuffing so much pork in the bills we think are trying to create a charcuterie.

This post was edited by Skinned on Mar 23 2020 03:20pm

Yet Skinned et al. keep insisting on their "GOP bad, puppets of their corporate overlords, all they ever do is fuck over poor people - Dems good, always fighting for the little man" talking points.
And they call us cultists...

The true enemy is the bourgeoisie, Comrade!

I know it varies for some people but I only acknowledge a thing when it happens, in this case is when a bill is passed. It's not what it'd like like either, but I'm amazed republicans actually going for it. This is also why I didn't bother to get informed on it this early, that's just useless information in my brain at the current time.

I guess I was wrong, unless you count the mega poor. But that's not surprising for republicans, they wouldn't want to give money to people who don't work because they're lazy and/or illegals. I mean, Senator Rand did call them non-people after all.

I'll have to check that one out the next time we drive up to the Shore. Usually do a fall color drive up there.

But pretending both parties are equally bad seems to help Republicans, because usually Democrats are better at governing.

well one issue is that the companies who can produce the needed items have generally already ramped up production significantly. 3M is making twice as many masks, Philips has quadrupled ventilator production
but production already takes weeks or months on the supply chain and exerting the DPA to force businesses who don't make these commercial products to switch all their production lines and get new equipment, well that would be a pretty drastic step that wouldn't have any impact until months from now. And I guess it comes down to that decision making on where we think we are on the curve. If things get much worse in coming months it would help, but if things get better, we'd be heavily disrupting industry and wrecking their commercial operations without compensation and setting a precedent to nationalize an industry willy nilly.

So its not like its a quick fix. There's some tradeoffs and questionable utility. It might prove to be a necessary step and failing to do so could worsen a crisis, but it could also be a complete waste.