From a policy guy at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget:
Cheat sheet on who would get how much in $2,000 checks – pic.twitter.com/RCE76aadG6
— Marc Goldwein (@MarcGoldwein) December 29, 2020
The basic math is that the checks don’t even start phasing out until an individual makes $75,000, or until a married couple makes $150,000. (The median household income was about $66,000 last year.) And the phase-out rate is 5 percent — for every $100 you make above the threshold, you lose $5 — so if the checks go to $2,000 per person, a single person will get at least some money up to $115,000 in income. As you can see in the table above, couples with kids can get thousands of dollars at far higher incomes.
Even if the checks were limited to the working class, they wouldn’t make much sense. Those who actually lost their jobs are covered by other parts of the bill, and if we think the working class in general should have more money, we should expand support for them permanently rather than giving a one-time payment.
At most, a payment limited to the working class might help some people wrongly passed over by the unemployment system, at the cost of giving money to lots of other people too. But this is decidedly not limited to the working class.