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> That amount went to everyone, regardless of job loss.

This is provably false. It only went to people who filed taxes in 2019 and who met the qualifications.

Despite both of those things still being true, and having lost my job as a direct result of COVID-19, I was still told I would not be receiving the benefits. I was not given a reason by the automated system and I have yet to reach a human being to explain my rejection. I am far from an isolated case

> This is provably false. It only went to people who filed taxes in 2019 and who met the qualifications.

The stimulus check will be part of your 2020 tax return, and you will claim the money as a refund then if you have not already received your money. Any money incorrectly paid out will likewise be reclaimed via that process.

Paying out next year upon filing taxes doesn't do a lot to keep people afloat who are unemployed now. That's long enough to end up on the street.

All you said is true, but this is the mechanism Congress decided to distribute the money (a universal, early tax refund for 2020), and that are its failure modes - some people will get it later than others if the government doesn't currently have their information on file, or only has paper returns.

> That amount went to everyone, regardless of job loss.

I did not get any notice as such, but my understanding as to why I got $0 was I made too much money to qualify. So I don't think your statement is in any way accurate. It did not go to "everyone"

> That amount went to everyone, regardless of job loss.

No, it didn't.

Okay, to be pedantic because your comment didn’t provide full details:

The $1200 went to adults who were not dependents of someone else and who earned less than a certain threshold, with the amount prorated depending on your AGI and your tax filing type (single, married, head of household).

My point was that everyone qualified for it. It wasn’t dependent on losing your job first. You could keep your job and still receive the (up to) $1200 stimulus if your income met the thresholds.

Part of the problem is that many people lost their jobs and were/are unemployed for months, but had a tax filing in a prior year above a threshold disqualified them from receiving the $1200.

There are quite literally millions of people who qualified for the stimulus, but didn't receive it. I know several of such people.

Fine if you want to add the amount for subsidizing the Unemployment Insurance from the CARES Act the numbers again:

$4T to the FED to prop up the stock market

$700B in forgivable loans to small businesses (PPP program)

$300B in taxpayer stimulus checks

$260B in Unemployment Insurance subsidies

>suggesting that we could all have received $18K is disingenuous. Proper response should be targeted where needed

It is not disingenuous at all to say taxpayers should have received the lions share of these bailouts (bailouts being paid for by taxpayers), or at minimum its not disingenuous to say taxpayers (not law makers beholden to corporate interests) should have dictated where the bailout funds go...I would say it is disingenuous to claim taxpayers would have sent 8x the amount they received to the FED to prop up an overvalued stock market that was already at record highs.

The FED has only bought around 3 trillion dollars worth of assets and basically all of that is being used to buy our own governments debt (the same debt used to fund the CARES act) and US mortgage backed securities, not the stock market as you can see from their balance sheet [0].

[0]: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h41/current/h41.htm

The 2 largest numbers on their balance sheet are:

Reserve Bank credit: 7,009,664

Securities held outright[1]: 6,115,130

[1] Includes securities lent to dealers under the overnight securities lending facility (when people talk about JPow money printer go brrr...this is what they are talking about and nearly every night for 2 months after the FED got the $4T overnight the markets would skyrocket)