Jared Bernstein: ‘You Simply Cannot Gauge the Needs That Are Met By This Relief Plan by Looking at ... GDP’

EXCERPT:

BERNSTEIN: "You simply cannot gauge the needs that are met by this relief plan by looking at a forecast for gross domestic product or GDP. First of all, we know that if we don’t get control of this virus, this economy is just not going to hit the kind of recovery that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris envisioned. And that’s going to take virus control and it’s going to take vaccine production and distribution. And that is at the heart of the American rescue plan. We also know that this is a K-shaped recovery. There are a lot of people, myself included, who have never missed a paycheck throughout this crisis. But on the bottom leg of the K, there’s a lot of folks who have been disproportionally hit with economic losses and with healthcare crises. And so, we can’t just look at these aggregate numbers and sigh we’re going to be okay without addressing those who have been hit the hardest. And not just in this crisis, but for years on end."