Handouts to the wealthy did nothing to boost the pandemic economy. Here’s how the US should take a different approach in 2021.

Handouts to the wealthy did nothing to boost the pandemic economy. Here’s how the US should take a different approach in 2021.

Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures, a cofounder of the Seattle Review of Books, and a frequent cohost of the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast with Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein.

In this week's column, Constant explains why doling out aid to wealthy corporations through the CARES Act stimulus package didn't achieve its purported 'trickle down' effect.

Handouts to the rich left small businesses and low- and middle-income Americans struggling, and when these groups don't have money to spend, the economy shrinks and more people lose their jobs.

The country's resolution for 2021 should be to put more aid directly into the hands of Americans who need it, Constant says.

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Back in January, if you'd asked me what I thought the top economic story of 2020 would be, I would have confidently replied that the presidential election would far and away command the economic conversation for the year.

I would have been dead wrong, of course. 

The economic downturn accompanying the pandemic was the biggest economic story of 2020, and it wasn't even close. 

Even back in April, less than a month after lockdowns rolled out across the country, ordinary Americans could tell that the corporate handouts in the CARES