Why We Can’t Have Nice Things—Part Two

Killing the Historically Successful Responses to Covid Poverty

This piece originally appeared on Fran Quigley’s blog Housing Is A Human Right on December 5, 2025.

This is part two in a three-part series exploring how the U.S. created and expanded amazing social programs in response to the early months of the Covid pandemic, only to backtrack fully.

Part One, available here, covered how and why politicians have convinced us that Americans do not support programs for housing, food, and healthcare—even though history and current public opinion polling show convincingly that we do.

Part Two discusses the dramatic, historic impact that Covid response programs like expanded unemployment insurance and child tax credits had—more people were safely housed and fed, and had access to healthcare. Who could not love this?

Part Three will answer that question: Corporations and wealthy individuals who are dependent on a population that is poor enough to take on sub-poverty-wage jobs—a dynamic that has been in place for decades—killed off these programs.

Jacobin published my article covering portions of these themes, especially Parts Two and Three. You can read the article on their site here.

PART TWO: Immediate Success—Until Low-Wage Capital Strikes Back

In March, 2020, the Trump administration (yes, the Trump administration) and the U.S. Congress quickly passed legislation that created and expanded lifesaving and life-changing programs. Many of them were extended and improved a year later in the early months of the Biden administration.

First, they addressed unemployment insurance, which is notorious in the U.S. for being difficult to qualify for. The majority of jobless workers do not receive benefits, many because they are labeled as independent contractors—often illegally—or gig workers or seasonal workers. Those who do receive unemployment benefits get on average only 40% of their lost wages—and even those benefits for only a limited time.

The CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act of 2020 supplemented weekly unemployment benefits by $600 a week at first and then $300 a week. It provided benefits to the former independent contractors or part-time workers who were previously ineligible and extended the length of benefits coverage. That added up to $650 billion in unemployment benefits paid out for the period between March 2020 to September 2021.

Then, in September, 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control issued a moratorium on most evictions, which was accompanied by multiple states issuing their own moratoria. In 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act increased the Child Tax Credit to $3,600 for children under six years old and $3,000 for children ages 6-18. During the same period, the U.S. provided extra food benefits through the SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) and halted the red-tape trap of Medicaid eligibility recertification that routinely kicks people off of the healthcare program.

The impact was immediate and dramatic. The likely economic catastrophe for millions of households was not only averted, the number of children living in poverty had the largest single-year drop ever to a record low of 5.2%. The Child Tax Credit expansion alone kept over 2 million children out of poverty.

Research showed that households were using the expanded unemployment benefits and child tax credit on food, rent, and utilities. So it was predictable that the number of families experiencing hunger and falling behind on their mortgages and rent dropped. The CDC eviction moratorium cut eviction filings by more than half, preventing at least 1.55 million eviction filings. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta estimated that the increased unemployment benefits alone, which allowed many at-risk workers to avoid Covid-19 exposure in contact-intensive service-sector jobs, saved 27,000 lives in 2020.

Image by by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free

Low-Wage Capital Strikes Back

Who could possibly not cheer for results like this? Well, for one, billionaires who require people to be struggling enough that they are willing to be Domino’s Pizza delivery drivers. “The real pinch point in the business is drivers,” Domino’s CEO Ritch Allison complained to shareholders in early 2021, blaming “high government stimulus checks” for the dearth of delivery drivers. In my hometown of Indianapolis, those drivers are paid an average wage of $13.77 an hour for one of the most dangerous jobs in America.

Pizza chains were just one voice in what grew to be a deafening chorus of protest by corporations with business models that rely on low-wage workers. Owners of hotels, restaurants, and other hospitality industry corporations raised the alarm. McDonald’s, Subway, and other fast food restaurants posted signs saying “no one wants to work anymore.”

“When did everyone get so lazy?” asked an owner of a Montana resort. Most of the complaints focused on the expanded unemployment benefits, but the corporate-supported think tank Cato Institute said the larger child tax credit would similarly cause “reductions in labor supply.”

That kind of dehumanized language was telling, sociologist Matthew Desmond, Pulitzer Prize winning author of the book Evicted, says. “The world’s first capitalists faced a problem that titans of industry still face today: how to get the masses to file into their mills and slaughterhouses to work for as little pay as the law and market allow. Hunger was the capitalists’ solution to the labor question.”

In 2021, people were not hungry enough. So the collective political mouthpiece of these corporations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, swung into action. In early 2021, the Chamber began to openly lobby Congress and the White House to end the enhanced unemployment benefits. At the same time, the landlord lobbyists at the National Apartment Association ramped up their own push against the eviction moratorium, including what the Washington Post called “a barrage of legal challenges” to its legality. Fast food franchise owners, restaurant executives, and the National Restaurant Association members cashed in their millions of dollars in contributions to governors of states, urging them to refuse to distribute the enhanced federal unemployment benefits.

These corporate business and landlord lobbies were following a well-worn playbook. Even in the midst of the Great Depression’s widespread suffering, the Chamber of Commerce opposed New Deal programs to alleviate poverty. The Chamber played a key role in blocking comprehensive healthcare reform during both the Clinton and Obama administrations—despite the fact that many small and medium-sized businesses would benefit from a single-payer healthcare system.

The landlord lobby’s resistance to economic support for the poor and working-class dates back to the New Deal era as well. Since its inception in the 1930’s, the for-profit real estate industry attacked public housing, successfully lobbying the federal government to cap construction costs, forcing the use of cheap materials. They demanded that public housing be segregated and blocked the mixed-income public housing models that work so well in other nations.

In Part Three, we see how this corporate and landlord power killed off the successful Covid-era programs.