The European Union on Tuesday finally agreed the historic €750-billion Covid-19 aid package. Meanwhile, in the United States the same measures are set to expire and negotiations are underway on a new stimulus package.
RT’s Boom Bust is joined by the CEO of Transformity Research Tobin Smith to discuss the governments’ responses to the pandemic.
“A huge amount of government revenues in Europe are from the value-added tax that we don’t have in the United States,” says Smith. He points out that “In the US, we have 31 million people not working today out of a workforce of 50 million. That’s like five times more than we had during the Great Recession.”
According to Smith, the US does not have the “capacity to get the vaccine so far, so we get to plan this into the next year…”
The $600 per week in federal unemployment benefits that more than 25 million Americans have been getting will end this week. “So, the government has to pass something and they have to pass it quickly,” says Smith. “You would see the world crashing down quickly in the United States because, all of a sudden, people stop spending.”
For more stories on economy & finance visit RT’s business section
