Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont harshly criticized Democrats who want to make fewer people eligible for the next COVID-19 stimulus checks. Sanders, who is the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, characterized it as “unbelievable” that some Democrats “want to lower the income eligibility for direct payments from $75,000 to $50,000 for individuals, and $150,000 to $100,000 for couples.”
Sanders wrote his tweet as Democrats are debating who should be eligible for the stimulus checks. Some Democrats say the income threshold should be lower for the checks, arguing that the latest round of stimulus should only go to the neediest families. That effort is led by Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and it has received pushback from many Democrats, including Sanders, who tweeted Saturday that he found it hard to believe that some people who received checks under former President Donald Trump wouldn’t get them now that President Joe Biden is in office. “In other words, working class people who got checks from Trump would not get them from Biden,” Sanders tweeted. “Brilliant!”
Sanders reiterated his point with a subsequent tweet from another account. “In these difficult times, ALL working class people deserve the full $1,400,” Sanders tweeted. “Last I heard, someone making $55,000 a year is not ‘rich’.”
Sanders immediately received support from several allies, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The New York lawmaker retweeted Sanders’ tweet and wrote that “It would be outrageous if we ran on giving more relief and ended up doing the opposite.” On Friday, Ocasio-Cortez wrote that it was “shockingly out of touch to assert that $50k is ‘too wealthy’ to receive relief.”
Sanders’ tweet came shortly after Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who chairs the Progressive Caucus, also tweeted her opposition to lowering the threshold. “We promised people that if we won the Senate, we would send out $2,000 survival checks. They delivered us to victory—and now we MUST deliver,” Jayapal wrote.
Speaking on CNN on Sunday, Sanders said he supports a “strong cliff” for the payments “so it doesn’t kind of spill over to people making $300,000 a year.” Right now the plan calls for the amount of money a person receives to start decreasing when they pass the threshold. “To say to a worker in Vermont or California or any place else, that if you’re making, you know, $52,000 a year, you are too rich to get this help, the full benefit, I think that that’s absurd,” Sanders said.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen also expressed a similar sentiment on Sunday. “If you think about an elementary school teacher or policeman making $60,000 a year, and faced with children who are out of school, and people who may have had to withdraw from the labor force in order to take care of them,” Yellen said, “I would certainly agree, that it’s appropriate for people there to get support.”
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