Democrats Revive $600 Stimulus Check in Oregon: Democrats in the Oregon House of Representatives reintroduced a bill on Tuesday that would send $600 stimulus payments directly to the bank accounts of over 250,000 residents in the state.
It’s an idea that Oregon Democrats had previously floated, and under the latest iteration of the plan, hundreds of thousands of low-income and middle-income families who applied for earned income tax credits in their 2020 tax filings will be eligible for additional stimulus.
The plan must now be passed in the state legislature.
Stimulus Check: What Happened to the First Plan?
State Rep. Andrea Valderrama, a Democrat from East Portland, said that proponents of the plan threw out an earlier version of the bill for two reasons.
First of all, the original bill set out a process that allows low-income workers to apply for the stimulus payments. However, legislators were reportedly unhappy with the prospect of finding a state agency or other third-party company that would handle the applications and determines who does and does not qualify for the payments. Not only would it have taken time, but it would have also been expensive.
Secondly, the first bill specified the kind of workers who would and would not be eligible to receive the payments. The new bill simply states that anybody who applied for earned income tax credit in their 2020 state tax filing will receive the $600 check.
No Social Security Number is Required for Stimulus Check
In what is likely going to be a major point of contention for Republican legislators in Oregon, the bill proposes that nobody should need to provide a Social Security Number to receive the stimulus check.
A Social Security Number is only granted to United States citizens, legal permanent residents of the United States, and noncitizens who legally work in the United States.
That means, if this latest Oregon stimulus bill passes, then residents of the state who are not legally present in the country may qualify for the payment so long as they file taxes using an individual taxpayer identification number. Known as an “ITIN,” this number is issued by the Internal Revenue Service to allow everybody, including illegal aliens resident in the United States, to file their taxes.
Non-Taxable Payments
The bill says that the payments are not taxable. Under the first proposed bill, Democrats hoped to give low and middle-income workers $2,000 checks. This year, conversations about reintroducing the bill started with a proposal of $1,000 checks, however, this figure was lowered to $600 to ensure that it would not be eligible for federal taxation.
Jack Buckby is a British author, counter-extremism researcher, and journalist based in New York. Reporting on the U.K., Europe, and the U.S., he works to analyze and understand left-wing and right-wing radicalization, and report on Western governments’ approaches to the pressing issues of today. His books and research papers explore these themes and propose pragmatic solutions to our increasingly polarized society.
