The United States Senate (USA) today approved a $ 1.9 billion (1.59 billion euro) stimulus plan to revive the US economy, which is President Joe Biden’s first legislative victory.
The financial package, the third approved in the US since the start of the Kovid-19 epidemic a year earlier, includes new direct payments of $ 1,400 (1,175 euros) to taxpayers with incomes below $ 80,000 (67,150 euros) per year. Funding for local and state governments, purchasing vaccines and reopening schools.
The plan was approved only after a debate, frantic talks and a marathon of votes by Democratic senators from 49 to 50 votes.
The bill will be forwarded to Congress next week, where a Democratic majority is expected to approve it early so that President Biden can sign it by March 14, before the current unemployment benefit is expected to be suspended.
“We tell the American people, help is on the way,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, expressing a desire to return to the nation’s normalcy.
The financial package, with an estimated total expenditure equal to approximately one-tenth of the size of the entire United States economy, is President Joe Biden’s priority.
The vote represented an important political moment for Biden and the Democratic Party, which required the party’s consensus in a 50–50 divided Senate that he leads because of Vice President Kamala Harris’s tiebreaker vote.
In Congress, Democrats have a narrow 10-vote margin.
Direct payments of up to $ 1,400 for most Americans, expanded emergency unemployment benefits, and large-scale investment and testing for Kovid-19, funding for state and city budgets, direct payments to bills with taxes for schools and industries Provides the bill to do. Benefits to help low-income people, children and families with consumers to buy health insurance.
The package faced solid opposition from the Republican Party, which sees it as a waste of money for Democrats’ liberal allies.
“The Senate has never spent $ 2 billion on a more random basis,” said Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
“His top priority is not an epidemic relief, it’s Washington’s Democratic wish list,” he said.
The financial plan follows five others, totaling $ 4 billion (€ 3.3 billion) that Congress has implemented since last spring and comes at a time when signs of a possible reversal in the progress of the epidemic are visible.
Vaccine supplies are on the rise, deaths and cases have declined, but are still high, and employment has increased in the past month, although the economy remains at 10 million fewer jobs than pre-epidemic levels.
Since the onset of the epidemic, the United States has accumulated 522,610 deaths and 28,886,283 cases of the disease.
The United States is the country with the highest number of deaths due to Kovid-19 and also with the highest number of cases of infection.
According to a report made by the French agency AFP, the Kovid-19 epidemic caused at least 2,581,034 deaths worldwide, causing more than 116 million cases of infection.
The disease has been detected by a new coronavirus in late December 2019 in Wuhan, a city in central China.
