WASHINGTON – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday it “will take years” to get the country’s coronavirus-ravaged economy back on track if Congress fails to enact President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief package, rejecting Republican claims that it is too big.
Yellen told CNN that with passage of the relief deal, the economy could return to what is considered full employment in the world’s biggest economy by 2022, with a 4% jobless rate compared to the 6.3% rate in January.
“There’s tremendous suffering in the country,” she said, with nearly 10 million jobs lost in the coronavirus pandemic and a reported 4 million workers who have given up looking for new work. The government reported Friday that the United States added only 49,000 jobs in January.
Biden Pushes for Quick Passage of Relief Bill as Jobs Report Shows Weak Growth
President urges Congress to ‘do something big’ to spur economy
Both chambers of Congress, each narrowly controlled by Biden’s Democratic Party, voted last week for budget rules that, if necessary, would allow Democrats to push through the new spending on party-line votes in both the Senate and House of Representatives without any support from Republican lawmakers.
Biden told reporters Friday, “I’ve told both Republicans and Democrats, that’s my preference, to work together.”
“But if I have to choose between getting help right now to Americans who are hurting so badly and getting bogged down in a lengthy negotiation or compromising on a bill that’s up to the crisis, that’s an easy choice,” the president said. “I’m going to help the American people who are hurting now.”
Based on the country’s slow recovery from the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, Biden said, “One thing we learned is, you know, we can’t do too much here. We can do too little. We can do too little and sputter.”
Top White House advisers are hoping to pass the Biden proposal by the first week of March, ahead of a March 15 deadline when current $300-a-week extra payments from the national government to jobless workers on top of less generous state benefits are set to expire. Biden wants to increase the extra federal payments to $400 a week through September.
A group of 10 Republican senators met with Biden at the White House last week, lobbying to keep the payments at $300 a week but ending them in June.
FILE – U.S. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris meet with a group of Republican Senators to discuss coronavirus federal aid legislation inside the Oval Office at the White House, Feb. 1, 2021.
Biden also plans to send $1,400 checks to millions of adult Americans, but Yellen said precise details of what income level the payments would be cut off have yet to be worked out.
Republicans opposed to Biden’s relief package are pointing to an opinion article published in The Washington Post last week by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a Democrat, suggesting that the size of Biden’s relief deal could “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.”
Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, in a CNN interview, said the U.S. is not facing “an economy in collapse.”
He said it is too soon to enact another big coronavirus relief measure.
“The ink is hardly dry on the last bill,” Toomey said, referring to a $900 billion package that then-President Donald Trump approved in late December.
Toomey said that while Biden has “made great speeches on (political) unity, he’s governing from the hard left.”
OTTAWA – The parliamentary budget officer says the federal government likely failed to keep its deficit below its promised $40 billion cap in the last fiscal year.
However the PBO also projects in its latest economic and fiscal outlook today that weak economic growth this year will begin to rebound in 2025.
The budget watchdog estimates in its report that the federal government posted a $46.8 billion deficit for the 2023-24 fiscal year.
Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland pledged a year ago to keep the deficit capped at $40 billion and in her spring budget said the deficit for 2023-24 stayed in line with that promise.
The final tally of the last year’s deficit will be confirmed when the government publishes its annual public accounts report this fall.
The PBO says economic growth will remain tepid this year but will rebound in 2025 as the Bank of Canada’s interest rate cuts stimulate spending and business investment.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.
OTTAWA – Statistics Canada says the level of food insecurity increased in 2022 as inflation hit peak levels.
In a report using data from the Canadian community health survey, the agency says 15.6 per cent of households experienced some level of food insecurity in 2022 after being relatively stable from 2017 to 2021.
The reading was up from 9.6 per cent in 2017 and 11.6 per cent in 2018.
Statistics Canada says the prevalence of household food insecurity was slightly lower and stable during the pandemic years as it fell to 8.5 per cent in the fall of 2020 and 9.1 per cent in 2021.
In addition to an increase in the prevalence of food insecurity in 2022, the agency says there was an increase in the severity as more households reported moderate or severe food insecurity.
It also noted an increase in the number of Canadians living in moderately or severely food insecure households was also seen in the Canadian income survey data collected in the first half of 2023.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct 16, 2024.
OTTAWA – Statistics Canada says manufacturing sales in August fell to their lowest level since January 2022 as sales in the primary metal and petroleum and coal product subsectors fell.
The agency says manufacturing sales fell 1.3 per cent to $69.4 billion in August, after rising 1.1 per cent in July.
The drop came as sales in the primary metal subsector dropped 6.4 per cent to $5.3 billion in August, on lower prices and lower volumes.
Sales in the petroleum and coal product subsector fell 3.7 per cent to $7.8 billion in August on lower prices.
Meanwhile, sales of aerospace products and parts rose 7.3 per cent to $2.7 billion in August and wood product sales increased 3.8 per cent to $3.1 billion.
Overall manufacturing sales in constant dollars fell 0.8 per cent in August.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 16, 2024.
