Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Sunday insisted that the $600-per-week unemployment insurance isn’t fair to taxpayers.
The expanded benefits are slated to end on July 31, although in some states, the benefits will end sooner or have already ended.
“It just wouldn’t be fair to use taxpayer dollars to pay more people to sit home than they would working and get a job,” the Treasury secretary told Fox News on Sunday.
Mnuchin also reiterated that the new unemployment benefits will be 70 percent of wage replacement.
The Republican proposal will be unveiled on Monday, July 27, Mnuchin also announced on the program. He also showed optimism about coming to a deal with Senate Republicans and Democrats.
“We can move very quickly with the Democrats on these issues. We’ve moved quickly before, and I see no reason why we can’t move quickly again,” he said.
GOP lawmakers and White House officials have said that the benefits have created a disincentive for people to return back to work. House Democrats passed the HEROES Act in May, which would extend the extra payments until January 2021.
Mnuchin, meanwhile, said that Democrats also opposed a payroll tax that was proposed by President Donald Trump, saying “it was very clear the Democrats were not going to give us a payroll tax cut.”
But Mnuchin also noted that direct stimulus payments have more impact.
“The direct payments are a much quicker way of effectively giving everyone a tax cut—much quicker than the payroll tax cut,” he said before adding that “June retail sales were 1 percent higher than June of last year, so all that money we pumped into the economy, it worked, people went out and spent.”
Last week, the White House team downplayed the differences with the GOP senators over some provisions of the bill.
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