with covid kras cases incr, use our website to follow the trends, track the spread and watch updates on demand anytime at c-span.org/coronavirus. you're watching c-span3. your unfiltered view of government. created by america's cable companies as a public service and brought to you today by your television provider. programs referring to a benefits cliff ahead of the new year. npr correspondent chris arnold has been covering the looming crisis. he joins us now from boston. chris arnold when we talk about a benefits cliff, what specific programs are we talking about, and about how many americans

could be impacted in the coming weeks? >> well, i mean, there are too many to even mention. it's a couple dozen, i think, if you add it all up. the big ones, i think, are unemployment benefits, certainly for people who are out of work. they're depending on which numbers you look at, somewhere around 12 million people who -- what happens a lot of the time people run out of state benefits. you get a certain number of weeks. you get beyond that and your benefits in normal time would run out. now the federal government and the c.a.r.e.s. act stepped in, okay, we'll extend those towards the end of december because it's a national crisis and this is what the government does in times like this. but now that's ending. you have all these people who have shifted on to this federal government life raft and it's about to sink. again, 12 million people losing their benefits. the only thing keeping them in their houses to buy food and even that is not enough because the state benefits are pretty

meager. they keep basically the state level benefits when it shifts to federal. so it's not even a lot of money but they're going to lose that. >> for the unemployment assistance, that 12 million number made up of 7.3 million americans who are on the pandemic unemployment assistance program, 4.6 million americans are on the pandemic emergency unemployment compensation program. we heard from one of those in the first segment on that latter program but why did the government set a december deadline -- a december sunset for these programs to come to an end? what waeginal thinking there? >> you know, i think you have to go back to march and remember that when this thing hit, we were thinking, oh, okay, maybe we'll all wear masks, or maybe not. for a couple of months and we'll stay home. and then we'll get through it. i think most people just didn't

anticipate at the time that this was inked or anticipate enough that they were going to go beyond it. clearly we are in a very bad situation where every public health person and most economists that i talked to say you have to extend this. it's not like things are -- it's not troo yue that we're roundine bend here. there are more people dying -- the pandemic is at a level it's never been before. you look at those maps, everything is just deep red with the pandemic breakout. california is shutting down most of its businesses again and restaurants. people can't get work. this is the financial cliff. >> we'll be talking about that $908 billion bipartisan covid

relief bill. we're expecting to see the language later today or tomorrow. provisions that the sponsors have put into that program, that $908 billion made up of $180 billion to extend to the tune of $300 a week for individuals. >> i think that's an expanded $300 a week. you get your base level benefits which, again, can be barely enough to make rent. that extra $300 a week is like the extra getting before. this is kind of a compromise of an extra $300 so you can pay the rent. you can buy groceries. >> talking about rent, also, $25 billion included in that bipartisan bill for rental

assistance. i want to focus on that for just a second. that program expiring over the end of the year, do we know how many people could face losing their home come the new year? >> millions for sure. how much time do we have here, john. first i was reading a major national newspaper that i won't name over the week. they have this eviction order, called an order, in place aimed at stopping evictions for now and the worry, okay, that's at the federal level. that disappears. we suddenly are going to have millions of people getting evicted. the truth of the matter is this

thing from the cdc is not like a lot of the state eviction moratoriums that we saw before in places like california and a lot of states. those were a blanket simple you cannot put someone out of their home. the cdc order is very different. the director has to know about it. they have to go to the cdc website. they have to print out this complicated form. it says under penalty of perjury i swear, blah, blah, blah. one of the things they have to swear to they've applied for every single available type of housing assistance and, you know, you could -- it's a crime if you lie on this form, and some people are freaked out by that. more often people don't know about it. people are getting evicteded 80% of the time. they don't even show up in court. it's a big mess. we work with a local reporter jen rice at a station in houston and she went around and watched 100 different eviction proceedings and 99 of them, this

was early on moved forward. even now, the people are not as protected as people think they are. that cdc order is doing something. it is discouraging big landlords from filing evictions, in some cases some people are taking advantage of it. that goes away. i think another thing that's happening states have been rolling off in massachusetts they did away with their eviction moratorium. much weaker. you allow that to expire, it's a big mess. >> and we're talking about it in this 45 minutes of the washington journal this morning. it's been called a benefits cliff coming up here in the coming weeks at the end of 2020. npr has been writing a lot about the economic impacts on struggling americans when it comes to the coronavirus

pandemic. phone lines if you want to join the segment as usual, republicans 202-748-8001. democrats 202-748-8000. independents 202-748-8002. chris arnold, we're going to start out of montague, michigan. bill is a democrat. bill, good morning. >> caller: yes, i was wondering if the $300 was going to be retroactive to some date. >> that's a good question. i think a lot of people would hope it would be. i have not seen those details yet. that could be part of what they're hashing out but it's an excellent point. the plan was to have the $600 expire, i believe it was in

july, and that sunseted. i don't know what the argument would be to go backwards and make it retroactive. look, there's certainly been a lot of people struggling. i'm not sure if you're one of them where it hasn't been enough money, people are selling possessions just to pay rent. wouldn't be a crazy idea for sure. i haven't heard whether they're talking about that. >> you were talking a minute ago about the eviction moratorium. you wrote in one of your recent pieces for npr that struggling homeowners still have better protections than struggling renters. explain. >> this gets at a couple of different things. before we talk about those particular provisions. one thing we know this pandemic is hurting people on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum win also means oftentimes people of color more

often -- they're more likely to be hurt financially lose their job, et cetera, and with the health outcomes that go along with all of these things, too. in housing we're seeing something similar where the people with less got less help in the aid programs. so renters, like i said, there's this crazy patchwork of eviction moratoriums, some more effective than others, there's no money. the first time around there wasn't any money to pay the landlords which wasn't fair to landlords or renters and the renters will come out owing six months of rent and they're just getting another job or something. that's not good for the economy or them. okay, look over at homeowners. congress did this great thing. i think everybody universally likes this. if you get into trouble because you lost your job or there was income or your spouse or whatever happened you call up your mortgage company, i can't pape the mortgage because of the

covid outbreak and you are able to skip six months of payments with no penalty, it doesn't hurt your credit report. and then if you say i need another six months you could get another six months and there's a very,very, very smart way in the system to pay that back which is, they move all of the missed payments to the back end of the loan term. if you paid $1,200 a month on your mortgages or $2,000 a month on your mortgage. at the end of the year, you pay $1,200 a month on your mortgage, not some additional crazy burdensome repayment plan that, again, you're getting back on your feet financially, that's going to be really hard. it's the end of your 30-year own, the payments get tacked on there. that works. but it's a better deal that homeowners have. >> i wonder your thoughts on how we define a good economy in this country.

this is d.j.'s tweet from just a minute or two ago watching along saying people being evicted, food insecurity, kids out of school, people unemployed, people losing homes, people seeking tools to pay rent. but the stock market is doing great. everything is okay. the stock market is doing great. >> the stock market is not the economy. and, you know, how to -- what parts of this to deal with first. i think what the market is doing, just to explain that part is, the market is looking ahead six months or a year and saying, all right, we got a vaccine. the light is at the end of the tunnel might be two, three months away, but we see the light. and corporations got a huge tax cut not too long ago. all of these factors come into play when you're pricing stocks. in terms of the short or near term outlook for the economy, it can be a different equation,

right? it's a much -- california is shutting down. more people out of work. we're losing benefits now. if we don't extend these protections for people, i was talking to the chief economist for moody's analytics, this is not some advocate for poor people here, this is a major wall street type institution and he's saying if we do not extend unemployment benefits, have a robust rental assistance program, eviction moratorium, that the economy is going to slide back into recession. and then the stock market is not going to like that. we are on a cliff here. so far, the market is being optimistic about it. we don't extend these things -- to my mind, that changes. >> laurel, maryland, is next. >> caller: i had a question.

for the people that are being evicted and so forth and the food pandemic, the buses delivering food to people that can't get into the social services, are most of these people being evicted illegals and people that can't get into the social network that can't seem to get the service that most -- that we can get here being citizens? we're seeing it a lot here in this county. can you elaborate on that right there? >> yeah, it's really good question. that's an -- it's a really good question. and i think the short answer is, we don't know. i think there was -- part of the reason we don't know, there's a lot of people who deserve benefits who should get benefits who are not getting them yet, who have been waiting for six months. i did a story out of california where -- you got to remember, these unemployment systems, their different system in every state, a lot of them are running

on computers from the 1970s or something. and they're doing stuff the way people used to do it. and then they get hit with ten times the volume of people needing unemployment and a lot of things have gone wrong. a huge one that they found in california, excuse me, was that they have these fraud prevention programs where you have to do what's call identify verification, send us your -- you get stuck in this cycle of just trying to prove you are who you say you are. it's a fraud prevention thing. they're not giving money to the bad guys or something. but it catches very little fraud. almost no fraud is caught this way they found in california. but it stopped 40% of applicants from getting their benefits for months and months and months and months. that's nuts. it could be somebody who is

undocumented. it could be somebody who doesn't qualify because maybe they ran through all of this unemployment before. there's a weird explanation. or it could be they should be qualified but they live in california, they work in las vegas. it was confusing for the system to deal with and then they got to move to the back of the line and stuck there for six months. but it's a complicated answer. i think it's -- to some degree, that's a reason why these other forms of support are important. if you're having trouble getting unemployment money, you can still keep your house. even though stimulus checks -- i don't think they're going to be part of this. that goes to everybody who can get them. a anyway, i think that's a lot of what's going on from there. >> maybe we'll hear from some of those folks who have been through some of the situations that you described. the phone line, democrats,

202-748-8000, republicans, 202-748-8001. independents, 202-748-8002. chris arnold, another one of your recent stories from npr, more americans pay rent on credit cards as lawmakers fail to pass covid relief bill. talk about what's happening with american's credit. >> it was a 70% increase over last year and people paying rent on a credit card. some of that might be, it's convenience. but, you know, you don't have to be an economist to realize that a 70% jump in people paying rent on credit card is not a good thing. if you're paying 20% interest on a card and having to start paying rent on it, you know, i think it's just another sign -- it's like the food lines, you know, that are on tv all the time, stretching down around the block and people who have never gotten food before are doing

that now because the situation is so desperate. i think a lot of people putting rent on a credit card who never wanted to do that before. >> barbara is next out of deerfield beach, florida. good morning. democrat. >> caller: good morning. my name is barbara. today is my birthday. >> happy birthday, barbara. >> caller: i'm 193. i was 14 for pearl harbor day. i was having a birthday party. we didn't know what pearl harbor was. and then we were at war for almost four years. and it was terrible. but we pulled through and we're stronger today. but of course in those days we didn't