CHAMBERSBURG – It looks like the $1.9 trillion federal spending package will pass this week. It includes another $1,400 in stimulus checks for people who qualify as well as child tax credits of up to $3,000. This made the topic list with the morning crew on NEWS TALK 1037FM today.
“You can’t just keep spending and spending,” Attorney Clint Barkdoll, on the local-live morning radio show First News, warned. “And now more tax cuts on top of the spending. The national debt for every household in America would be over $200,000 and the meter just keeps running.”
Barkdoll believes “the stage is set for real problems in this regard” and the only way out “is going to be massive spending cuts” even though “there’s no appetite to do that so the debt’s just going to keep rising.”
Michele Jansen, First News cohost, noted that she knows of a family that hasn’t missed a paycheck since COVID began and if the $3,000 child tax credit goes through, they’re going to be “scooping up” almost $20,000 that they really don’t need.
She went on to add: “I don’t understand the resistance to cut back on what the test levels should be for that. Republicans are proposing lower levels like 40,000 to 50,000 for individuals and 100,000 for couples, but the limits that the Democrats are setting many, many people who didn’t miss a paycheck are going to get a big windfall.”
Talk then turned to Joe Manchin, a Democratic Senator from West Virginia, who recently said he will not support the minimum wage increase to $15 an hour.
“Joe Manchin is probably the most powerful influential person in Washington in that regard,” Barkdoll said. “There’s some reporting that Manchin may also try to make these qualifications to get the checks more restrictive. As we know in a 50/50 Senate, all you need is one person like that to come up with some more common sense solutions.”
Barkdoll wondered if the group of 10 Republicans in the Senate could make the stimulus more targeted. He said, “The two bodies [House and Senate] will have to reconcile it probably next week.”
Jansen worried that the $15 minimum wage is “the give-in” for the package. That will be the compromise, but they will do everything else.
Barkdoll said he’s “always so skeptical of these negotiations for what you just said. Was this all just kind of the dance? And they would come in at the end and act like they made concessions when going into it maybe this was all put on the table just for negotiation.”
