WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 16th October, 2020) Some 14 million Americans have fallen back into poverty as the coronavirus pandemic throttles the economy, a Columbia University study revealed on Thursday.
"The CARES Act's stimulus checks and unemployment benefits lifted more than 18 million individuals out of monthly poverty in April, but this number fell to around 4 million individuals in August and September after the expiration of the $600 per week unemployment supplement," Columbia's Center on Poverty & Social Policy said in a paper published Thursday.
Congress passed four packages of CARES � or the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act � in the second quarter of this year, dispensing roughly $3 trillion as PPP for workers, loans and grants for businesses and other� personal aid to qualifying US citizens and residents.
The White House and rival Democrat lawmakers have been locked in a stalemate since on a successive package to the relief, arguing over its size, as thousands of Americans, particularly those in the airlines sector, risk losing their jobs without further aid.
"The CARES Act, despite its shortcomings, was initially successful at mitigating what would have been large increases in poverty," the Columbia study concluded. "The expiration of its two major income support provisions has reversed that progress."
Some 21 million American jobs were lost between March and April, at the height of lockdowns forced by the COVID-19. About 2.5 million jobs was added back to the economy in May and 4.8 million in June, before the recovery began slowing. For all of September, there were just 661,000 job additions.
The US economy itself shrank at its fastest pace in history in the second quarter of 2020, contracting by 31.4 percent, after a drop of 3.4 percent in the first three months of the year. In 2019, the economy grew by 4.1 percent.
