Will the jobs report on Friday, December 4, be worrying enough to blast Washington out of what increasing looks like another stalemate over funding the government and another coronavirus stimulus bill?
Economists generally expect that the jobs report will show that the economy continues to slow under the impact of new economic restrictions intended to slow the rate of coronavirus infections.
Right now Congress and the White House aren’t showing much sense of urgency over either the economic pain in the country, which will get significantly worse when just about all the earlier coronavirus stimulus programs expire on December 3, or on passing a bill to fund the federal government past the December 10 deadline.
Democrats and Republicans are still arguing about whether the economy is bad enough to justify another big coronavirus stimulus and rescue bill. And the Trump administration seems to have checked out if negotiations.
The Senate is set to return this afternoon, but beyond votes on Trump nominees, Senate leadership hasn’t put steps to address the coronavirus stimulus or the government funding deadline on the agenda. The House doesn’t return until Wednesday. That doesn’t leave much time to assure that the government will have money to continue to operate after December 10. Especially because, while committee leadership has agreed on spending levels, there are still unresolved issues that could scuttle the entire effort. The White House, for example, continues to threaten a veto of the defense spending bill if it includes a measure calling for the renaming of will continue to operate the cash, though Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hasn’t outlined a full agenda of votes beyond confirming a roster of Trump nominees. He’s also suspending the regular in-person lunch meetings of Republican senators because of the nationwide spike in coronavirus cases.U.S. military bases now named after Confederate generals. The Black Caucus in the House has said that measure must remain in the bill or they will vote against it. There’s also the issue of continued funding for President Donald Trump’s border wall. That money is now in the Senate bill but a dispute over that funding shut the government for 35 days in 2018 and into 2019.
No one knows whether President Trump will sign a spending bill even if Congress were to pass one.
And finally, will the market react to bad news on jobs or a potential government shutdown or the lack of progress on a coronavirus stimulus bill? Recently the market has proved remarkably able to look past those problems and focus only on the promise of a coronavirus vaccine.
Will that continue to be the case? Or is some amount of bad news too much bad news to ignore.
