2020.0328.0012...

The stimulus bill includes a tax break for the 1%

Opinion by Ed McCaffery - March 28, 2020

(CNN) We face a frightening pandemic. More than 100,000 American have been infected with Covid-19, while tens of millions more continue to shelter at home. Meanwhile, the markets are crashing.

And yet the more things change, the more they stay the same.

While health care workers and local governments frantically race against the clock to keep up with the escalating medical caseloads while trying to keep themselves and their families safe, Congress was still able to find the time to give money away to rich people.

Thanks to a stunning new report from the New York Times, which has been relentless on the tax beat during the Trump administration, we've learned that a provision has been included in the 880-page coronavirus stimulus bill to help the very wealthy in a way that is breathtaking in its scope and detail.

It is worth taking a minute -- many of us have more of those now in our quarantined states -- to explain.

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Trump Suggests He Can Gag Inspector General for Stimulus Bailout Program

In a signing statement, the president undermined a key safeguard Democrats had insisted upon as a condition of approving $500 billion in corporate relief in the $2 trillion law.

By Charlie Savage - March 27, 2020

WASHINGTON — When President Trump signed the $2 trillion economic stabilization package on Friday to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, he undercut a crucial safeguard that Democrats insisted upon as a condition of agreeing to include a $500 billion corporate bailout fund.

In a signing statement released hours after Mr. Trump signed the bill in a televised ceremony in the Oval Office, the president suggested he had the power to decide what information a newly created inspector general intended to monitor the fund could share with Congress.

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