United States President Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly contemplating another slate of coronavirus aid measures, the Washington Post reported Sunday.
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Citing two anonymous officials familiar with the White House deliberations, the Post reported that the Trump administration is weighing "a payroll-tax cut, a capital-gains tax cut, creating 50-year Treasury bonds to lock in low-interest rates, and a waiver that would clear businesses of liability from employees who contract the coronavirus on the job."
The fresh plan would unequally benefit the wealthy while providing little assistance to those most in need, according to critics.
"A capital gains tax cut would be smash-and-grab economics with no value to the economic and medical calamity facing us," HuffPost senior reporter Zach Carter tweeted.
Critics also pointed the other proposals understudy inside the White House, including the waiver relieving companies of responsibility for employees who contract the deadly virus while working.
Journalist Jon Walker called the Trump administration's reported plans "the worst possible set of ideas for dealing with a pandemic."
White House discussions over the potential new aid package come as the multi-trillion-dollar coronavirus package Trump signed into law late last month is failing to get much-needed relief to workers, newly unemployed, and small businesses.
The Trump administration launched Friday the US$350 billion small business relief program allowed under the first stimulus package. But the rollout was disastrous as small businesses struggled to apply for loans and some of the biggest banks in the country ignored the process entirely as the Treasury Department failed to supervise it.
"The estimate is there are 30 million small businesses out there," wrote the executive editor of The American Prospect David Dayen.
"About 4.5 percent of all of them will have a chance to get relief. Half of the small businesses haven't paid rent in April, which if I'm doing the math correctly is more than 4.5 percent. And millions of them will have no federal help, no customers, and really no hope."
Workers and the unemployed, meanwhile, are still waiting for the one-time US$1,200 cash payments and expanded unemployment benefits to which they are now entitled under the law.
"The law's provision to boost unemployment benefits has become tangled in dated and overwhelmed state bureaucracies, as an unprecedented avalanche of jobless Americans seeks aid," the Post reported.