On Thursday, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin appeared via phone on Fox Business Network to speak about the efforts being employed by the Trump administration to help Americans who have been economically impacted during the coronavirus pandemic.
Regarding the “trillion dollar plan” being proposed, Mnuchin spoke first about the $300 billion “that goes to small businesses” to be “used [for] hiring people, keeping people on the payroll.” The secretary said that if those rules are followed, “there will be loan forgiveness on that afterwards.”
Mnuchin then spoke about the direct stimulus to the American people:
The second component, and … I refer to this as “checks in the mail,” but that’s the – it’s really money direct-deposited. Most people, we have all their information, and the plan is $500 billion in two tranches. The first one would be $1,000 per person, $500 per child. So, for a family of four, that’s a $3,000 payment. As soon as Congress passes this, we get this out in three weeks, and then six weeks later, if the president still has a national emergency, we’ll deliver another $3,000. So that’s a lot of money to hard-working Americans who are at home, no fault of theirs.
Mnuchin added that “the third component is $200 billion that we can use for more facilities with the Fed like we’ve been doing for secured lending to airlines and for other critical industries.”
“The president is determined to go big and support the American economy,” Mnuchin later added.
When host Maria Bartiromo pressed Mnuchin on getting politicians to vote for the measure, the secretary said that “the things that the Fed and we can do, we will do,” but also added that he is seeing bipartisanship in action.
“This is about protecting the American economy,” Mnuchin said. “You had an overwhelming bipartisan vote in the Senate and the House.”
Mnuchin also focused in on the positive, telling Bartiromo:
I think once you see more and more money coming into this economy, Americans are gonna feel a lot better, and they’re gonna understand that this is a virus – we’re gonna get through this. This is not the financial crisis that will go on for years. We are gonna destroy this virus, and our economy will come roaring back better than ever.
The coronavirus, which originated in China’s Hubei province, has infected over 236,000 people worldwide, and led to more than 9,700 deaths, according to data from the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) Global Cases map. Nearly 85,000 people who had coronavirus have recovered.
In the United States, there have been more than 11,000 confirmed cases of the illness, and 157 deaths as of publication.
Italy, which is viewed as a hotspot for the virus in Europe, has had over 41,000 confirmed cases, and approximately 3,400 deaths. More than 4,400 have recovered, according to the CSSE Global Cases data.
On Thursday, President Trump said that he “directed the FDA to eliminate rules and bureaucracy” in order to get potential coronavirus treatments to Americans as quickly as possible. “We have to remove every barrier or a lot of barriers that were unnecessary, and they’ve done that to get the rapid deployment of safe, effective treatments and we think we have some good answers,” Trump stated.