On Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Cross Connection,” House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth (D-KY) stated that under the coronavirus relief bill, “there will be people who could use” the $1,400 direct payments “who will not get it, but, again, 250 million people will.”
Yarmuth said, “I think that what you have to say is we’re giving a lot of money to state and local governments. They can use that money in a variety of ways. They can set up assistance operations and plans for people in need. The fact is that you can’t use, as many people have said, a scalpel to do national legislation. You have to do — make broad decisions and come up with answers, and this is one of the things that we have to do. And there’s no right level. If you set up a system based on need, it would take probably at least six months to set it up, and then you’d have to create a huge bureaucracy to actually consider people’s personal situation. You just can’t make policy that way on the national level. So, yeah, there will be people who could use that $1,400 apiece who will not get it, but, again, 250 million people will.”
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