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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 3/17/20

Sunday Night's Debate Failed the Coronavirus Test

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"This threatens to be worse than the financial collapse of 2008. The meltdown didn't cause people to stay home, cancel mass gatherings and travel and shut down schools for weeks/months," Yang warned on Twitter. "There needs to be a stimulus at an economy-wide scale to avoid the real chance of a depression."

Yang was unfairly accused during his bid for the nomination of being a one-note candidate. But now, amid the COVID-19 outbreak, the UBI note is resonating, as the former candidate -- who has endorsed Biden, while hailing Sanders as an "inspiration" -- explains, "Treating this as a pandemic is one thing. Treating this as an imminent economic depression and societal catastrophe spurred by a pandemic is another. You should flood the zone with buying power and a sense of personal financial security as fast as possible."

On Friday, two congressional Democrats proposed a somewhat Yang-like plan that would "send checks to 200 million Americans within three weeks of the legislation's passage, followed by additional monthly payments for the rest of the year."

Representatives Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat who backs Biden, and Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who serves as a cochair of the Sanders campaign, are backing legislation to establish an emergency Earned Income Tax Credit in response to the pandemic. They explain that their legislation would "provide a check between $1,000 and $6,000 to every American who earned less than $65,000 last year. More than three-quarters of American workers would qualify for this tax relief. Americans most likely to be impacted by the public health crisis -- including hourly workers, independent contractors, and gig workers -- would get a much-needed emergency boost during this economic downturn."

And over on CNN, commentator Van Jones said that the candidates would have been smart to echo Yang. "If we're gonna be honest," said Jones, "the only way to keep the economy from going into a complete free-fall now is to put money directly into the hands of people."

A candidate who was not even in the race any longer had the idea that needed to be talked about Sunday night. Unfortunately, the remaining candidates talked about the need to "make people whole" without ever explaining how to do that.

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John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written the Online Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.

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