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Similarly, an expansion of the Affordable Care Act in the COVID-19 rescue plan will boost health coverage subsidies, helping not just the lower-income people who have already been eligible for significant—but not always adequate—subsidies to buy plans on the exchange, but also middle-class people who haven’t been able to afford the plans but also haven’t qualified for significant help. Now, premiums won’t cost more than 8.5% of those people’s modified adjusted gross income. This lasts for two years, but again, it will show people what government can do when Democrats have power and the political will exists, and the question will be whether government takes away what it previously gave.
That’s still just the beginning. Parents and others with dependents in need of care will go from a maximum dependent care tax credit of $1,050 for one child and $2,100 for two or more children to $4,000 for one child and $8,000 for two or more, helping the parents (or adult children of elderly people in need of care) pay for care while they work or look for work.
Low-income adults without children will see an increase in the earned income tax credit, with the maximum going from $543 to $1,502, and raises the income thresholds at which people are eligible for the minimum and at which the credit phases out entirely.
Aid to Black farmers will help slow the rapid loss of land they have faced over decades, thanks in large part to government discrimination—discrimination that’s not left in the distant past but continued in Donald Trump’s huge farm bailouts that went almost exclusively to white farmers.
People who have lost their jobs and are trying to keep their health insurance through COBRA will receive subsidies. Some industries hit hard by the pandemic will get help, including restaurants and child care. Then, of course, there’s the funding for vaccinations and other direct efforts to stem the coronavirus pandemic itself. And the funding to help schools reopen safely, and to help state and local governments weather the pandemic and the associated economic damage.
And the outcome of all this? Experts say it will be a major boost to the U.S. economy: “Morgan Stanley on Tuesday raised their 2021 forecast for U.S. economic growth to 7.3% from 6.5%, a pace unsurpassed since the Korean War boom in 1951. The OECD the same day more than doubled its own estimate,” Bloomberg reports.
This bill is the first and likely the best possible down payment on showing voters what Democrats want to do and could do for the country. Now the urgent goal is to make sure people know what they’re getting and why and from whom.
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