Mnuchin: Americans will start getting stimulus checks next week [Video]

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• On late Monday, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that Americans can receive their COVID-19 stimulus checks before the year ends.
• The new relief assistance provides one-time $600 payments to working Americans and a $300 weekly allowance to unemployed individuals.
• President Donald Trump directed a tax break provision on meals catered by the restaurant industry.

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced on Monday that COVID-19 stimulus checks can be provided to Americans as early as next week.

“The good news is this is a very, very fast way of getting money into the economy. Let me emphasize: People are going to see this money at the beginning of next week,” the secretary told CNBC.

Mnuchin urged the eligible Americans who will receive the payments to directly use it in bolstering the nation’s struggling economy.

“People go out and spend this money, and that helps small business and that helps getting more people back to work… So it’s very fast, it’s money that gets recirculated in the economy,” he said.

Mnuchin’s interview came following the consensus made by both chambers of Congress in a $900 billion coronavirus relief plan on late Sunday. Both Senate and the House are set to put it on a vote later.

Individual taxpayers with an annual income of $75,000 are expected to receive $600 aid and married couples with a combined salary of not more than $150,000.

The package also involved giving unemployed individuals with a $300 weekly allowance, tenants facing eviction, Payment Protection Program loans amounting to $284 billion, and schools and colleges’ $82 billion allocations. A $1.4 billion budget was also allotted for President Donald Trump’s border wall project.

According to the Washington Post, the package comes with a discreet specification on halting the tax imposition on corporate meals requested by Trump, which is known as the “three-martini lunch.”

Trump called the tax break inclusion to help the restaurant businesses, which also took a financial hit because of imposed lockdowns.

After an initial opposition on the said inclusion, Democratic legislators finally agreed to it with the condition that fellow GOP colleagues should concur to expand tax credits for the marginalized sector, which includes low-income families and the poor.

Last March, the first wave of COVID-19 relief package known as the CARES Act, was passed as a one-time payment of $1,200 to qualified Americans.

Source: New York Post