--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Good morning, I'm Duarte Giraldino. And I'm Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: We begin today with the stalled attempts on Capitol Hill to pass another round of coronavirus stimulus.
--:-- Shamita Basu: On Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned, without any further relief, the country's economic outlook will remain bleak for the foreseeable future.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But last night, President Trump sent mixed messages on Twitter. First, he ordered an end to negotiations altogether. Then he tweeted he was open to some sort of immediate relief for airlines and small businesses, but not through a larger package.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Congress has already passed four rounds of relief, totaling $4 trillion. And that's through a combination of grants, loans and tax breaks.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Collectively, this has been the most expensive relief effort ever in American history. And this is kind of remarkable.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Washington Post notes that's more money than what the U.S. spent on 18 years of war in Afghanistan.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But the question remains, has the money been well spent?
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to the Washington Post, well, not really. And to be clear, no one is saying the country doesn't need help. Individual workers and businesses are suffering.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Both Republicans and Democrats agree the U.S. needed the stimulus money to get through the pandemic's initial economic shock.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But what this analysis is also finding is that the money wasn't necessarily spent in the right ways or given to the most deserving.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: For example, only a fifth of stimulus money went to individual workers. That's real people.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Half of the money went to businesses. And as the Post sees it, a lot of those businesses didn't really need government help and in some cases were not incentivized to use that money to keep people employed.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Take the CARES Act. That's the largest of the four relief bills that were passed by Congress this year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Under that law, companies could apply for tax breaks. And the Post's analysis finds companies in industries that were actually doing well during the pandemic, they were still eligible for government bailout funds.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One insurance giant, Manulife, is eligible for $54 million in tax refunds.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A medical equipment maker, Owens & Miner, is eligible for $13 million, even though the company's business is not hurting right now.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One grocery distributor United National Foods has seen revenue increase by billion this year. Its president recently was boasting about how well the company's doing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And still it applied for a million tax refund under the CARES Act.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Or just look at the Paycheck Protection Program, you know, PPP.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That program was supposed to give loans to small businesses to help them keep workers on the payrolls.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: But in many cases, the businesses that qualified did the opposite. They used that money to pay for severance packages.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The Post notes more than 210 hotel owners received PPP funds and most have yet to rehire their laid off staffs.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Post also found money didn't proportionately flow to the states and sectors most in need.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For example, the virus hit New York hard in the beginning and the city is still feeling the pandemic's economic devastation.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And yet fewer than one in five small businesses in that state were approved for a PPP loan compared with Nebraska, where more than one half of small businesses got the loans.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The problem, according to the Post's analysis, is that this isn't a normal recession.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In a normal recession, you can throw a lot of stimulus money back into the economy and expect things to somewhat stabilize.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But this is a recession in a pandemic. In order to save the economy, the government also needed to throw enough money into public health measures to get the pandemic under control.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: In the last relief bill, the one passed in April, Congress approved $25 billion for COVID testing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: A lot of that money actually hasn't even been spent.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Yeah, and in the most recent negotiations, the ones that just got squashed, Democrats called for $75 billion for testing, contact tracing and other treatments.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But Paul Romer, who is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, says even that amount of money is not enough.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: He tells The Washington Post, the government should have earmarked at least $100 billion for testing efforts alone.
--:-- Shamita Basu: He says it's a waste to spend money stimulating the economy without also restraining the spread of the virus.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: There are these two houses in Ohio, only about a 23-minute drive away from each other.
--:-- Shamita Basu: One's in Cleveland, the other's in the suburbs.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Bloomberg Businessweek says they tell two very different stories about how the pandemic is affecting the economy and the widening gap between renters and homeowners.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Kalei Gaythings is a renter in Cleveland, but she recently lost her job as a nursing assistant during the pandemic and she fell behind on her rent.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Her eviction hearing played out on Zoom.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You might have heard about a nationwide pause on evictions during the pandemic. That moratorium is in place but Gaythings wasn't covered by it because she wasn't receiving government assistance.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Zoom hearing lasted for less than five minutes, and she was forced to leave her home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Just around the same time as Gay Things' Zoom eviction hearing, Nathan Hodge and Erica Schultzstadt were in the process of buying a home in a Cleveland suburb.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: They paid more than $300,000 for their new home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's more than the asking price and more than twice what the previous owner paid in 2011.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One's a software architect, the other's an engineer.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So they were able to keep their jobs while working from home.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Census Bureau surveyed 9.8 million renters in September and asked them, how likely is it that you might get evicted in the next two months?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Almost half said that seems likely.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When they surveyed homeowners, less than a fifth of them said they had similar concerns about foreclosure.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And that's happening because in the COVID economy, homeowners are feeling more secure, while renters are feeling more at risk, more likely to lose their home.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Cleveland went into this pandemic as the poorest of the 100 largest U.S. cities.
--:-- Shamita Basu: According to Bloomberg, in many ways, the city's still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One thing that could help renters, like Gay Things right now, is more federal assistance.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The CARES Act provided money for a nationwide rental assistance program, but it's starting to run out of money.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The CDC announced a national pause on evictions, but according to the Cleveland Housing Court in the city, that moratorium only delayed about a dozen evictions.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This week, a wildfire in California reached Gigafire status. That's a new record for the state.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: The Gigafire burned more than one million acres.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's larger than the size of Rhode Island.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: It's burned through three national forests and stretches across seven counties.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The L.A. Times explains this all started in mid-August with a bout of lightning strikes, more than 12,000 strikes in 96 hours.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: That's what started several wildfires in Northern California.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And in the following weeks, nearly 40 of those fires merged into what's now the largest wildfire in state history, what's known as the August Complex.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Lightning strikes usually cause fires in remote areas, but this year, we're seeing lightning spark blazes in more populated locations as well, like the Bay Area.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Firefighters said there just weren't enough resources to fight all the fires at the same time, so they focused on urban locations and deprioritized rural ones.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: This allowed the August Complex to grow larger and larger.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The LA Times explains there could be an important lesson here.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Some scientists say the unintentional neglect of this fire earlier on is showing us what it looks like when a slow-growing wildfire is left to burn naturally instead of being suppressed by firefighters.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The August complex is burning more slowly and less intensely than other fires.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Instead of burning up everything in its path, this fire makes it likely that larger trees will survive, which anchor the whole forest ecosystem.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And if it keeps going this way, if the August complex burns up brush and overgrowth while keeping large trees intact, it could make the case for controlled burns and slow-growing wildfires to play a bigger role in forest management.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And now it's time for another installment of What's Your Excuse?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Did you know more than 4 million people have already voted in the 2020 election?
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: According to the United States Elections Project, that's 50 times more than the number of people who voted at this time in 2016.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, based on early turnout, the Elections Project is predicting we could see the highest vote since 1908.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: One of this year's early voters is a woman named Beatrice Lumpkin.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She is 102 years old, and she tells CBS radio station WBBM that she first cast her ballot in 1940.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: And since then, she has never missed an election.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Lumpkin told WBBM voting is especially important to her this year.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: When I was born, women couldn't vote.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And second, because it's the most important election of my lifetime.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Even the pandemic was not going to stop her this year.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So Beatrice threw on a hazmat hood. Her grandson made it for her.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: She got some gloves.
--:-- Shamita Basu: She walked out of her home and she headed out to drop her ballot in the mailbox.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: So if a 102-year-old can do it, so can you.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Keep in mind, this week, voter registration ends and early in-person voting begins in dozens of states.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: To find out if yours is one of them, check out our Apple News voter guide.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We have tons of information broken down by state, about key deadlines, and how to make sure your ballot gets in on time.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app.
--:-- Shamita Basu: We'll talk with you again tomorrow.
--:-- Duarte Giraldino: Goodbye for now.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Goodbye.
