Memo: Automatic Stabilizers are Popular with Voters
By Ethan Winter Analyst, Data for Progress
Executive Summary
By a two-to-one margin, voters support Congress implementing policies to automatically increase social spending when there is an increase in unemployment.
Sixty-three percent of voters strongly prefer assisting those in need even if it increases government debt.
Voters are supportive of the unemployment insurance system, supporting it by a 61-percentage-point margin.
Since the coronavirus pandemic arrived in the United States, the American economy has tumbled toward cataclysm. Initially, hoping to slow this fall, the Federal Reserve provided $500 billion to temporarily patch the repo funding markets. Additional action soon proved necessary, though, and it arrived in the form of the CARES Act, the roughly $2 trillion relief measure that, among other things, “supercharge[d] unemployment.”
