Two days before the elections, what about the second stimulus check and unemployment benefit?

The leaders of both parties seem to agree on the need to approve a new economic recovery plan, but disagreements continue

There are two days left before the election day that will decide who will occupy the White House for the next four years and what the composition of the country’s legislative power will be like. But the president-elect will not take office until next January 20, almost three months later. And in the meantime, American families will continue to need the financial help they have been waiting for months to cope with the coronavirus crisis.

In a week in which the infections by the new virus have once again broken their own record, the question that arises is whether there will be an agreement before the inauguration or if the negotiating parties will wait for the new positions to be elected to get to work . The leaders of both parties seem to agree that a new stimulus package needs to be approved, but the big stumbling block remains the same, the full amount.

“We probably need to do another package,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Friday . “I think it will be something that we will have to do right at the beginning of the year, ” he added. There are two months until 2021 starts.

“Indeed, we will have something at the beginning of the new presidency, but we don’t want to have to wait so long because people have needs,” Pelosi acknowledged in an interview on MSNBC Friday .

McConnell reiterated his thesis and said that the new bill should be much smaller than what the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and the Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, have been negotiating , and ” definitely much more modest than the three million dollars ”that the Lower House approved last May but that has not even been negotiated in the Senate. In October, Democrats also backed a proposal that lowered the total amount to $ 2.2 trillion.

The Republican leader of the Senate once again breaks with President Donald Trump’s insistence that the economic recovery plan be generous and include the second direct payment and renew the unemployment benefit, among other items.

On the same Friday, Trump promised to the press that “we will have a tremendous stimulus package immediately after the elections .” Although, days before it had conditioned its approval on how the chambers are composed after the elections.