AMERICANS could receive a fourth stimulus check in a number of different ways as pressure mounts to send out more relief payments. The Biden administration and some lawmakers are working on another stimulus package as politicians like Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren push for more payments. About 20 Democratic senators – including […]
AMERICANS could receive a fourth stimulus check in a number of different ways as pressure mounts to send out more relief payments.
The Biden administration and some lawmakers are working on another stimulus package as politicians like Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden and Elizabeth Warren push for more payments.
About 20 Democratic senators – including Wyden and Warren – sent President Joe Biden a letter urging him to include recurring relief payments in his Build Back Better infrastructure package.
That’s one way Americans might see a fourth stimulus check in 2021. There are also other relief payment possibilities on the horizon.
The plan unveiled by House Democrats this week calls for permanent $300 stimulus checks to parents.
It proposes the extension of the one-year child tax credit expansion, an anti-poverty initiative that was a large part of the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan approved in March.
This new plan would maintain the child tax credit, increase to $3,600 per child under age 6 and a little less for kids between 6 and 17, at $3,000.
Previously, the amount for both was $2,000.
Rep Rosa DeLauro, chair of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the co-sponsors on the new bill, addressed it in a statement
“We must use this moment to pass the American Family Act and permanently expand and improve the child tax credit by increasing the benefit to families and providing payments monthly,” she said.
“Children and families must be able to count on this benefit long after the end of this pandemic.”
An increase in the federal minimum wage might also provide a boost to millions of Americans.
The current federal minimum wage is at $7.25 per hour, but many lawmakers are calling for it to be raised.
Senators Mitt Romney and Kyrsten Sinema have proposed raising the minimum wage to $11 per hour, while others believe it should be $15 an hour.
Biden himself supported raising the minimum wage to that amount, but in February 2021, top senators ruled the wage increase would violate strict budgetary rules in the economic relief plan.
The President previously said at the final US presidential debate: “There is no evidence that when you raise the minimum wage, businesses go out of business.”
“Anything below that puts you below the poverty level,” he added.
Biden signed an executive order on Tuesday that raised the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $15 an hour.
The current minimum wage of $10.95 will subsequently be raised by nearly 37 percent by March 2022.
One other way some Americans may see further relief payments is if bonus unemployment checks are extended.
The American Rescue Plan provided an additional $300 in weekly unemployment benefits and continued $100 for Mixed Earner Unemployment Compensation through Sept. 6, 2021.
Some lawmakers are urging for those payments to be extended.
As for the most recent stimulus payment, a seventh batch of $1,400 stimulus checks have been sent out to Americans as IRS continues to process tax returns.
The payments sent out over the last six weeks are worth roughly $384 billion.
More than 1.2 million payments totaling over $3 billion were given to Americans not previously on file, and 730,000 “plus-up” payments worth $1.3 billion were also issued in the last few weeks.
