After the story published, I received a bunch of heartbreaking inquiries from folks who really needed the money and had tried all kinds of things to get it, but kept getting "payment status not available" messages, and couldn't figure out the problem. propublica.org/article/millio…
I wish I had better advice. The IRS doesn't have enough resources to do the kind of casework necessary to cut through computer glitches and other paperwork confusion confronting millions of people. Low income folks often have complicated lives and stuff gets misplaced.
One thing the Treasury could do is stop fighting lawsuits over whether money is due to prisoners and the US citizen family members of undocumented immigrants. The IRS is currently under court order to cut checks to eligible incarcerated people, but time to apply was short.
And the deadline for paper forms, which is usually the only thing prisoners can access, passed last week. It's not clear yet how many prisoners got their checks. The firm litigating on their behalf received thousands of questions about how to make it work. beta.documentcloud.org/documents/2040…
The Treasury's lawyers are supposed to update on the status of their efforts to get payments out to prisoners soon.
Meanwhile, the litigation over spouses of undocumented immigrants is ongoing.
Questions of who's entitled to supposedly universal government assistance remain.
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NEW THING FROM ME: The CARES Act passed forever ago, but millions of people still haven’t received their stimulus checks -- either because they aren’t aware they need to file, haven’t been able to make it through the IRS’ glitchy portal, or were deliberately excluded from it. 1/
The IRS’ latest estimate for the number of people who are likely eligible but haven’t applied through its online portal for people who make too little to file taxes is 9 million. That was last month, but the agency says new figures aren’t yet available. The deadline is Nov 21. 2/
With little in the way of a federal public relations campaign, finding those people has required herculean efforts by outreach organizations, who have to walk people through a hard-to-navigate web interface without much help from backlogged IRS customer service agents. 3/
NEW: By Trump’s own benchmarks, his approach to trade hasn’t worked. Here’s my story about what he set out to do, the guy he chose to do it, the agency that carried it out, and the result so far. It’s the most complex, hard-to-balance piece I’ve ever written. This is why. 1/
I talked to dozens of former & current USTR employees, their foreign counterparts, and interest groups. USTR has long been seen as a special agency. Consistently across administrations, about 250 experts & lawyers considered it their mission to break down trade barriers overseas.
Enter Robert Lighthizer, probably the perfect person to carry out Trump’s agenda. He shared the president’s views, but had a much deeper understanding of arcane trade law and how negotiations work from his decades representing the steel industry. 3/
Happy Saturday. It’s 169 days since the CARES Act passed. As Congress dithers on another relief package, I want to show you what the stimulus has done for people, from the lowest-paid worker to the most profitable Fortune 500 company.
It’s time for a trip to Cleveland. (THREAD)
While reporting on the stimulus’s effects, one truth has jumped out: An outpouring of cash kept many small businesses afloat temporarily, but the law’s most generous, least conditional support went to large companies & the investors who back them.
It was a big corporate rescue.
This happened because the CARES Act allowed the Fed to purchase virtually unlimited quantities of corporate bonds, fueling a rapid recovery in the ability of corporations to borrow -- especially riskier companies that had already taken on a lot of debt.
NEW from me -- One of the biggest beneficiaries of the Paycheck Protection Program is a type of company that only technically employs most of its workers: Staffing firms, which handle payroll and recruitment for other companies, and got billions of dollars in loans. 1/
Temps are often the first to go in a recession, and the industry did shed hundreds of thousands of positions in April and May. But some sectors did very well, including healthcare and janitorial, as companies needed to bring people on for COVID-related jobs ASAP. 2/
We found that about 11,000 temp agencies got PPP money. A substantial number of those used the money to pay temps who were *still working on contracts,* which means that the bills paid by clients often went straight to the staffing firm’s bottom line. 3/
NEW: I got a couple big FOIA requests back recently for correspondence between members of Congress and @USTradeRep about tariff exclusions. One thing jumped out: The lengths to which Polaris, a Minnesota maker of power sports vehicles, went to get itself off the hook. 1/
@USTradeRep Last year, Polaris was looking at paying $90 million in tariffs. So it launched an aggressive campaign in D.C., involving powerful senators and representatives, who also received campaign donations. The lobbying even reached Sec. Mnuchin’s office at Treasury. 2/
@USTradeRep The emails also show a cozy relationship between Polaris lobbyists and top USTR officials, who forwarded Polaris’ appeals on to their own higher ups. Polaris also reached out via Peter Navarro, who asked USTR's chief of staff for assistance. 3/
Sunday morning study catchup time. Interesting work for journalists: What if the "What's the matter with Kansas" problem is fed by press coverage that focuses on the economic fortunes of the wealthy rather than disaggregating them from those of the poor? equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/upl…
The inexorable force of industrial consolidation: As regulators allow hospital chains to get bigger and bigger, one of the only checks on their pricing power is the monopsony of enormous health insurers. nber.org/papers/w27005.…
By April 20, California's shelter-in-place order saved on the order of 1,600 lives, at the cost of about 400-900 jobs per death averted (though that job loss is likely temporary). nber.org/papers/w26992.…
This is what flattening the curve looks like: