5 Things in House Democrats’ New COVID-19 Bill That Should Be DOA

House Democrats have released a completely unserious proposal to respond to the public health and economic crisis the nation is confronting as a result of COVID-19.

Spanning more than 1,800 pages, the bill represents a partisan laundry list of mostly bad policies, calling for trillions of dollars of additional deficit spending on handouts and items unrelated to the crisis.

Lawmakers should focus on the task at hand and respond directly to the public health crisis and its related effects, not abuse these unprecedented circumstances to push through partisan priorities that would derail the recovery.

Lawmakers must work together to create the conditions to safely reopen America, removing barriers to working, creating, and trading, and to enable American society to rise up again and drive the economic recovery.

1. Extending the $600 unemployment bonus: The bill would extend the misguided and harmful $600 unemployment bonus through January 2021, with an additional extension possible through March of next year.

It’s one thing to provide short-term and targeted unemployment benefits during forced shutdowns, but providing a year’s worth of unprecedented additional unemployment benefits—up to an extra $30,000 or more per worker—would be devastating to our economy, potentially even threatening our ability to combat COVID-19 and Americans’ supply of essential goods and services.

Using taxpayer dollars to pay unemployed workers more than employed workers is incredibly unfair to the hardworking Americans who continue to work each day—and wholly un-American.

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