Steve Wamhoff, the institute’s director of federal tax policy, said that the lower-income families who received the full amount of the two earlier stimulus checks would be receiving the full $1,400 from this round.
“All the people who need help are going to get help,” Wamhoff said.
Some said that they would have pumped the money right back into the economy, making the relief payments more akin to stimulus money.
Mikki Sethman had planned to use the funds to pay for trips to attend some of her daughter’s softball games at the University of Idaho, but she isn’t eligible. She says she’ll potentially dip into savings or go into debt to fund her trips, if she decides to go.
“Our check was going to go directly to helping the economy,” said Sethman, 46, a school teacher who lives near Los Angeles. “We were going to be the plane tickets, we were going to be the booked hotel rooms. Now we have to decide which games we can attend, and which ones we can’t.”
Others who aren’t receiving the checks this time say they could have used the money, but missing out wasn’t going to push them over the edge.
Samuel Suarez, 37, from the suburbs outside Raleigh, North Carolina, just missed the cutoff for this round of stimulus. He has come to terms with the fact that he and his wife won’t receive the infusion of cash this time around. He was laid off shortly after the pandemic but found another job and was helped out by unemployment insurance.
Suarez, who has two children, says the stimulus payments would have been useful as discretionary income, or as an emergency fund were he to be laid off again.
“We do alright, but we’re not rich by any stretch of the imagination,” he said. “Our income goes awfully quick when you’re spending half of it on your house and daycare.”
—With assistance from Laura Davison.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.