Welcome to the Jill on Money Podcast. It is Wednesday, February 24th. And this week, there's

a lot of action on the $1.9 trillion stimulus plan. Looks like it's going to move forward.

I talked about this on CBS this morning yesterday, but I want to beef this up a little bit

for you guys just to understand a little bit more about why this package is so big. This $1.9

trillion. It's because there's a lot of stuff in here that did not make it into the December

stimulus plan. Specifically, one thing that the December stimulus did not cover was money

to state and local governments. And why is this so important? State and local governments

have absorbed a double whammy of big spending, right? Big spending around COVID, but also

a loss in sales and other taxes. Now, the other really weird part about balancing your

books if you're a municipality is that this is usually a legal obligation. And that means

that if the states or municipalities don't get more money, we might see job cuts. And

that could clearly dampen the overall economic recovery. So one thing we didn't talk about

in this segment is that there is in this $1.9 trillion plan, additional help, $350 billion

in state and local government aid, $170 billion for K through 12 schools and higher ed institutions.

There's $50 billion for COVID testing, $20 billion towards a national vaccine program. So

remember, there was a bunch of folks who were like, oh, we don't want to bail out these

states where they've been irresponsible. They were usually Republicans who said that about

blue states. Maybe now with Texas having its own problems, well, everyone will get behind

this. We'll say the other thing that is really going to be interesting in this process is

that it's likely to go through with just democratic votes, meaning it's going to go through budget

reconciliation. I'm not so sure that we're going to necessarily be able to see the increase

of the federal minimum wage. We'll have to see about that. But all in all, I think this was a pretty

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