https://youtu.be/5Q3qbPO_cSc
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Friday that she hopes President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus package will help bring back full employment by 2022. Speaking with PBS NewsHour, Yellen said the U.S. needs to “go big” with coronavirus relief in order to help get the economy back on track to pre-pandemic levels. “It’s a big [stimulus] package, but I think that we need to go big now, and that we can afford to go big,” she said. “And the most important thing is to get our economy back on track and help people get their lives back, in order to make sure that this pandemic doesn’t permanently scar our work force. And I think this is what we need. I’m hopeful that, next year, with a package of this size, we can be back at full employment.” Yellen’s comments came after Friday’s announcement that the U.S. economy exceeded expectations by adding 379,000 new jobs in February. While Yellen said she was “pleased” with those numbers, she added that the unemployment rate is still running at about 10 percent. “When you think about the pace, although 379,000 jobs in one month, it sounds like a lot,” she said. “But, at that pace, it would take us more than two years to get back to full employment. And we’re — we want to make sure that our workers get back to full employment, the state we had in the economy before the pandemic struck, a lot sooner than that.” “The package that the president and his advisers put together that’s working its way through the Senate now was really geared to relieve the suffering of the American people,” she added. Biden’s stimulus package, called the American Rescue Plan, was passed by the House of Representatives on February 26 and has now been passed in the Senate. The package now goes back to the house where the Senate version of the bill is reconciled against the House version. It is expected to with little change.