Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernard Sanders blasted Sunday the idea of lowering the annual income threshold to $50,000 for the next round of coronavirus stimulus checks, calling it “absurd.”
“To say to a worker in Vermont or California or any place else that if you’re making $52,000 a year, you are too rich to get this whole help, the full benefit, I think that’s absurd,” Mr. Sanders said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The Vermont independent also said there was a problem of political optics, noting that the threshold for the first round of stimulus checks was higher under former President Donald Trump.
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“It’s also from a political point of view a little bit absurd that you would have under Trump these folks getting the benefit, but that under [President] Biden, who is fighting hard for the working class in this country, they would not get that full benefit,” Mr. Sanders said.
Mr. Sanders said he supports an annual-income cutoff of $75,000 for individual earners and $150,000 for couples, not the $50,000 threshold reportedly under consideration by some Democrats reported by The Washington Post.
“From a political point of view it is absurd to be telling working-class people, somebody who has a decent union job making $55,000, $60,000, sorry, you’re not eligible for the program,” Mr. Sanders said. “It makes no sense to me at all, nor do I think it makes sense to the American people.”
Under the April $2 trillion stimulus program, individuals earning more than $99,000 and couples making more than $198,000 were ineligible for stimulus checks.
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