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WASHINGTON — A stimulus package to save the US economy from the ravages of the coronavirus is expected to soar beyond $1 trillion, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday.
The bailout will include direct checks to Americans facing financial hardship, which is expected to cost $250 billion, as well as loans for small businesses and entire industries facing the brunt of the economic downturn.
“I know there’s been some rumors of the number. It is a big number,” Mnuchin said after a luncheon with Republican senators on Capitol Hill.
“This is a very unique situation for this economy. We’ve put a proposal on the table that would inject a trillion dollars into the economy that is on top of the $300 billion from the IRS deferrals,” he said.
At least $50 billion would be directed to the airline industry which has been devastated by travel restrictions in place around the globe.
The Senate has committed to staying in Washington until the stimulus package is passed and is preparing to sit through the weekend as the rest of the country goes into lock-down.
Comparatively, the bank bailout after the 2008 Great Recession, known as TARP, cost $700 million.
Conservative Republicans balked at the huge package which would further inflate the federal government deficit but said the COVID-19 health crisis was an unprecedented challenge.
“This is not some recession or some normal event that happens in cycles of our economy,” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said after the meeting.
“This is an extraordinary unprecedented challenge, and frankly, I say this without trying to sound alarmist, but to be honest, the worst is yet to come,” he added.
“We’ve got to deal with it. This is not a time to be cheap,” added Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana.
“We will have to do some cleanup later but in the meantime, through no fault of anybody, we had to shut down large portions of the economy for health reasons and we don’t want irreparably harm done to the economy.”
