Poll: 81% of Americans Support $2,000 Stimulus Checks

In 2019, Universal Basic Income was controversial and our support for Yang Gang created a huge fuss on this website. The idea of sending monthly checks to people to bolster the social safety net was even rejected by Bernie Sanders and the socialists in the Democratic primaries. Imagine what a difference that $12,000 would have made for the working class during the crisis we just went through.

Data for Progress:

Then 2020 happened.

The Federal Reserve bailed out the investor class when the stock market began to tank last March. Congress swung into action and passed the CARES Act to rescue Wall Street and authorized a one time pittance of $1,200 to ordinary Americans in order to get them to swallow it.

After Wall Street began to recover, Congress lost interest in COVID relief and went back to being as hopelessly polarized and dysfunctional as usual. Americans were told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and the performance art “deficit hawks” returned to form and blocked a second stimulus check right down until Perdue and Loeffler began cratering in the Georgia polls.

Even though 2020 is now over, there is no going back to the way things were before COVID. A majority of Americans now realize how vulnerable they are to shocks like a pandemic. No one before 2020 imagined that the government could simply shut down the economy on a whim, throw them out of work, forget about them and cause them to lose their health insurance. Similarly, the fight over the $600 stimulus check has put a spotlight on the contempt that Congress has for public opinion which overwhelmingly supports $2,000 checks. Even in Georgia, $2,000 checks are now as popular as barbecue.

The one time stimulus check that was passed with the CARES Act was so popular that it transformed public opinion on Universal Basic Income. I’ve watched support for a $2,000 stimulus check rise from 2/3rds to 3/4ths in the polls over the past month. Far from being so polarized that we are on the brink of Civil War 2, there is now just universal mounting fury at Congress.

There is super majority, majority or near majority support for key elements of Huey Long’s Share Our Wealth agenda: raising taxes on billionaires, Universal Basic Income, universal health insurance, free college education, etc. No one has floated the idea of a wealth cap to eliminate the billionaires who are corrupting our politics, but that would likely be immensely popular too. There is also universal contempt for Congress and frustration with performance art politics and the gridlock it causes. Nothing changes. How long will it take before the dam of partisanship holding back the torrent of rage busts?

Note: These aren’t new ideas. They are old populist ideas that died in the Great Depression when Huey Long was assassinated and the wealth redistribution that took place through the New Deal and World War II was successful in saving capitalism and quelling discontent.

About Hunter Wallace 12379 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

11 Comments

  1. The great example of UBI-type success is Japan, but this is too-little known in the West

    Japan had its market peak in 1989 and then a huge crash – such an enormous crash that to this day, its stock market never regained that high, and is currently less than 3/4 of that level

    But in dealing with the crash, the quasi-‘authoritarian’ Japanese government did one thing above all … kept people employed and getting their income, even if there was nothing to do at the office … companies were largely blocked from laying off people, or bankrupting each other; banks ‘carried’ loans, etc, and Japanese unemployment never much deviated from its standard 4-5% figure

    The Japanese government figured that what was most essential was giving people a little to spend and being able to keep their homes … dutiful, grateful workers in that homogenous society, put on their neckties and went to the workplace and contributed as they could to await the upturns

    That was 30 years ago, and Japan never had social devastation despite ‘zombie companies’ ‘zombie banks’, the world’s biggest mountain of per capita debt, etc

    Japan understood the key point – Give the humble workers the means to hang on and not get tossed out into the street … give common people a little to spend, and they will spend it … and the economy will survive thanks to that bit of worker spending

    • Japan is a homogeneous society without a large number of different infighting racial and social factions and Japan is not controlled by jewish bankers, though – that makes a huge difference.

      • Yes, they don’t have millions coming over their borders, to live off of their citizens’ taxed wages. People use that same tired argument about how Europe gave their citizens free healthcare.
        In the US, “the poor” get it all free.

  2. Nothing can unite this country! Its the juden, niggas, the wetbacks, the streetshitters and other colored monkeys against the White humans! It is always going to be like that and neither 2000$ checks nor UB will change that! I haven’t seen you writing anything about the South in a very long time Hunter!

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