Thread by @RBReich

As a former secretary of labor, I can tell you that we shouldn't be talking about stimulating the economy or going back to work.

We should be talking about shutting down the economy and keeping people home, with enough money so they can pay their bills.

THREAD.

Every bit of taxpayer money should be spent helping workers who need income, people who need help paying medical bills, and hospital workers who need protective gear.

Not one penny should be spent bailing out giant corporations.

This is a pandemic. The economy is irrelevant.

Corporations don't need bailouts. They have assets that'll be as valuable when this is over as they were before it started. They can get low-interest loans & use assets as collateral. Or they can use ch. 11 of the bankruptcy code to reorganize their debts until the crisis passes.

Putting "conditions" on taxpayer-funded corporate bailouts won't help.

If corporations promise to limit executive pay to, say, 50 times the pay of their typical workers, their armies of lawyers and accountants will find ways to hide or defer the executive pay.

Or corporations will just fire their lowest-wage workers, thereby raising the "typical" employees' wages so that executives can make the same bundles they used to make.

If corporations promise to keep employees on their payrolls, they'll just fire their contract workers and all others they've outsourced work to.

If corporations promise to give the government equity stakes in their firms, they'll just dilute the value of their shares of stock.

Once the bailout genie is out of the bottle, there's almost nothing government can do to get it back in.

Taxpayers will be shafted.

People won't get the help they need.

Which is why I keep saying:

#BailOutPeopleNotCorporations

We've seen this all before -- in the 2008 bailout of Wall Street, and in the 2017 Trump tax cut.

Corporations promise to use the money to sustain themselves over the long term, but they use it to pay off top executives and major investors.

Nothing ever trickles down to workers.

Why are corporate bailouts always on the table? Because big corporations and Wall Street are always the first in line when Washington opens its piggy bank.

They have squadrons of high-priced lobbyists (many of them former members of Congress) who know how to get what they want.

Corporations and Wall Street make the most campaign contributions, so politicians are dependent on them.

That means, when there's a $2 trillion tax cut or a $2 trillion "stimulus" package, corporations and Wall Street will rush to get in on the action. And they have.

Bailing out mega-corporations who have been dodging taxes, shafting workers, and bending the rules to enrich themselves for decades is bad enough in normal times.

Now, in a national emergency, it's morally repugnant.