Radio Recap – The Economic Impact of the Pandemic

By 

Jordan Sekulow

|
April 3, 2020

3 min read

Public Policy

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The economic stimulus goes live today.

On today’s Jay Sekulow Live we discussed the economic impact on the American people.

Obviously today with the economic numbers out we wanted to get into some of those details. We’ve got nearly ten million Americans who have filed for unemployment in the last two weeks alone. The payroll plunge is seven hundred thousand people in March. That is kind of a snapshot. That doesn’t give you the full scope. The unemployment right as of right now is already at 4.4%.  They are predicting that to be 15% and maybe even as high as 30% as this goes on.

The stimulus programs go live today online: SBA.gov, the loan programs, and so on. There are always issues when these first start. Some banks are balking at this. There are questions like should you be laying off your employees instead of trying to get the loan to keep them on payroll?

My dad, Jay Sekulow, made the following point:

Some of the banks are trying to give advice to their clients, to the companies saying: you’d be better off, even though this sounds like a good package, you would be better off limiting your exposure by laying off personnel. That is exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to do with this stimulus. You’ve got to understand that there is this thought out there that exists that that would be the safer approach for some businesses.

Now some businesses have already done it. I think the number was one hundred and thirty thousand for Macy’s. Kohl’s was eighty thousand. There was another big box retailer that had just announced. I think this is the reality of the moment we live in. Each business has to make these decisions.

I think the goal should be to try and maintain personnel. I keep saying the job of a CEO, even for us here, is to work hard on everything you can do but to try to protect your employees as well. What you don’t want is this ripple effect in the economy. We’re hopeful that we get past this over the next, say, three months or so. Then things will get to some sense of whatever the new normal is.

On Capitol Hill, they are even still balking on how the House and the Senate could change the way they vote. The Senate says that they’re going to keep the way things have been. Washington is trying to work the same old way.

ACLJ Director of Government Affairs Thann Bennett gave his analysis:

There’s a lot of resistance to changes. I feel the same way that Jay does about these changes. This is reality. They’re going to come back on April 24th. They’re saying that’s when a round four stimulus is going to be necessary. It is not going to be safe on April 24th for both those chambers to be filled with five hundred and thirty five members of Congress. They are going to have to face reality and find a way to make these changes and do their work remotely.

They need to do their work but they need to do it in the best way possible.

You can listen to the entire episode with further analysis, here.