money Debate continues on latest stimulus package
Yahoo Finance’s Jessica Smith joins the On the Move panel to discuss the latest with the second stimulus package and the struggle to reach an agreement surrounding benefits to those impacted by the virus.
Video Transcript
JULIE HYMAN: Let's go to what's going on to-- in the broader economy and particularly with stimulus because there is no deal yet. There is a meeting expected in about an hour, a further meeting after the renegotiations all weekend. Jessica Smith is in Washington with the latest for us. Jess?
JESSICA SMITH: Yeah, Julie. We expect democratic leaders to meet with Treasury--
- I guess that's yesterday's news.
JESSICA SMITH: --and the White House chief of staff later this afternoon. And as you mentioned, this does come after talks over the weekend. They met on Saturday for several hours. And it seems that meeting was maybe the most productive so far, but we're still not anywhere close to a deal. Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said that they've made some progress. It was productive. But they said they are still a long way off. And we also know that staff spoke yesterday, so we'll see if maybe they made any kind of progress before meeting this afternoon.
It seems that those enhanced unemployment benefits are still a major point of concern, a big point of contention in these negotiations. Republicans don't want to continue that extra $600 a week that workers who were laid off were getting up until last Friday when they expired. They did offer a one-week extension, though Democratic lawmakers rejected that idea. You'll remember they voted to extend the extra $600 through the end of the year months ago.
So now we'll see if they can come to any sort of a compromise, make any sort of movement on this. But it is not looking great at this point, because even in addition to those enhanced unemployment benefits, there are still other issues that need to be worked out, like state and local funding and liability protections for businesses. So we'll see over the next couple hours what we hear from lawmakers.
