It baffles me how online chatters who consider themselves progressive or leftists seen to show an inordinate interest in the upper threshold of the stimulus check – the fact that it cuts at $75k, and how it phases out between 75k and 80k.

To me, there is a clear set of priorities on which criteria we should care about:

1. The fact that people making under a certain amount do not get anything – under 20k? something like that. I haven’t looked into this, but this is how it was set up in the 2020 Stimulus checks, so it’s probably something similar.

2. The fact that it’s merely a one-time $1,400 for those who qualify

3. The upper threshold

#1 stems from the fact that definitionally this check is not free money – “an economic stimulus”, but instead, a flat tax break. That’s why people under a certain income threshold don’t get anything. And that’s a big problem. How are we not talking enough about this?

It bugs me how people obsess over the upper threshold so much that they go on to calculate that “over the $75k threshold, every $100 you make, you get $28 less in stimulus.”.

The amount of attention that should be devoted to #1 vs #3 should be in a proportion of 1:9 but it seems that it’s the reverse online.