{"id":8071,"date":"2022-06-09T18:21:03","date_gmt":"2022-06-09T18:21:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=8071"},"modified":"2022-06-09T18:21:03","modified_gmt":"2022-06-09T18:21:03","slug":"were-the-stimulus-checks-a-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/?p=8071","title":{"rendered":"Were The Stimulus Checks A Mistake?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“According to the\u00a0U.S. Census Bureau\u2019s supplemental poverty measure<\/a>, the stimulus payments moved 11.7 million people out of poverty in 2020 \u2014 a drop in the poverty rate from 11.8 to 9.1 percent. And the 2021 poverty rate was estimated to fall even further to 7.7 percent, per a July 2021 report from\u00a0the Urban Institute<\/a>. We don\u2019t know yet whether this came to fruition, but\u00a0Laura Wheaton<\/a>, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and one of the analysts behind the 2021 numbers, told us that it was clear from their analysis that the stimulus checks were driving a dramatic decline in poverty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


More broadly, the stimulus checks also cushioned workers during one of the worst economic crises in modern history, which likely helped the economy bounce back in record time. In April 2020, when Americans were receiving the first round of checks \u2014 up to $1,200 with the CARES Act \u2014 the unemployment rate was at\u00a0a disastrous 14.7 percent<\/a>. But two years later, it\u2019s almost returned to its pre-pandemic levels, with many job openings. \u201cI hope we don\u2019t forget how awesome it was that we supported people so well, and that we recovered as quickly as we did,\u201d said\u00a0Tara Sinclair<\/a>, a professor of economics at George Washington University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n


However, there is also evidence that the stimulus, especially the last round, likely stoked higher and higher prices\u00a0for the very people<\/a>\u00a0it was\u00a0intended to help<\/a>. Though\u00a0global supply chain issues<\/a>\u00a0(and, more recently, the\u00a0war in Ukraine<\/a>) have been significant drivers of inflation, the divergence\u00a0between U.S. and European inflation<\/a>\u00a0suggests there\u2019s more to it than that. In fact, a\u00a0recent analysis<\/a>\u00a0from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that the stimulus may have raised U.S. inflation by about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n


https:\/\/fivethirtyeight.com\/features\/were-the-stimulus-checks-a-mistake\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“According to the U.S. Census Bureau\u2019s supplemental poverty measure, the stimulus payments moved 11.7 million people out of poverty in 2020 \u2014 a drop in the poverty rate from 11.8 to 9.1 percent. And the 2021 poverty rate was estimated to fall even further to 7.7 percent, per a July 2021 report from the Urban Institute. We don\u2019t know yet whether this came to fruition, but Laura Wheaton, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and one of the analysts behind the 2021 numbers, told us that it was clear from their analysis that the stimulus checks were driving a dramatic decline in poverty.<\/p>\n

More broadly, the stimulus checks also cushioned workers during one of the worst economic crises in modern history, which likely helped the economy bounce back in record time. In April 2020, when Americans were receiving the first round of checks \u2014 up to $1,200 with the CARES Act \u2014 the unemployment rate was at a disastrous 14.7 percent. But two years later, it\u2019s almost returned to its pre-pandemic levels, with many job openings. \u201cI hope we don\u2019t forget how awesome it was that we supported people so well, and that we recovered as quickly as we did,\u201d said Tara Sinclair, a professor of economics at George Washington University.<\/p>\n

However, there is also evidence that the stimulus, especially the last round, likely stoked higher and higher prices for the very people it was intended to help. Though global supply chain issues (and, more recently, the war in Ukraine) have been significant drivers of inflation, the divergence between U.S. and European inflation suggests there\u2019s more to it than that. In fact, a recent analysis from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that the stimulus may have raised U.S. inflation by about 3 percentage points by the end of 2021.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[1316,624],"class_list":["post-8071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-inflation","tag-stimulus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8071"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8072,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8071\/revisions\/8072"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}