G2 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020
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the g overnment. It’s d emeaning. I
would love t o work, b ut I’m at t he
hospital a lot with my s on. There’s
no extra for anything.”Readers can write to Michelle
Singletary c/o The Washington Post,
1301 K St., N.W., Washington, D.C.- Her email address is
[email protected].
Follow her on Twitter (@SingletaryM)
or Facebook (facebook.com/
MichelleSingletary). Comments and
questions are welcome, but because
of the volume of mail, personal
responses may not be possible.
Please also note comments or
questions may be used in a future
column, with the writer’s name,
unless a specific request to do
otherwise is indicated.
challenges the agencies o n setting
a deadline for taxpayers who used
the o nline non-filer t ool, and
their decision not to send
payments to those who missed it.
The agency says t hey’ll have to
wait until n ext year t o get the
money when they file a 20 20 tax
return.
If more economic impact
payments are coming, Tr easury
and t he IRS need t o make sure
the most economically v ulnerable
get every dollar promised i n the
legislation.
“I don’t h ave entitlement
issues,” Brown said of t he
financial aid. “I just honestly
could u se it. People look at y ou
when you receive federal benefits
and t hink you are just living offwrote to Mnuchin, telling him she
represents “ thousands of families
who have been put on the back
burner for the emergency
stimulus funding.... Our
families are the ones that need it
the most!! We a re kept at t he
poverty l evel to maintain
Medicaid for our c hildren’s h ealth
benefits. We a re being told N EXT
year when filing [for] 2020 w e
can claim [ the $500]. I’m writing
you this to bring to the President’s
attention on how wrong this is.
Please help o ut families who truly
deserve help n ow just like every
other American citizen.”
Several parents living in
Philadelphia f iled a lawsuit this
month a gainst the Tr easury
Department and t he IRS. The suitHere’s t he problem. Many o f
these people didn’t k now t hey
had to use the non-filers tool.
Others missed an arbitrary
deadline the IRS set for them t o
claim the $500 p ayment o n top of
the $ 1,200 allotted to every
taxpayer o f low or moderate
income. Stimulus payments were
sent either by check, direct
deposit or an economic-impact
debit c ard.
Brown says she met the
deadline to submit i nformation
about h er son, b ut she still hasn’t
received the extra $500. She
shared w ith me an email she s ent
in May to Tr easury Secretary
Steven Mnuchin.
“I need t o express my
frustration and a nger,” B rowntax r eturns.
The expansion of this benefit to
cover all dependents, especially
disabled adults b eing cared for by
their parents, was an oversight
that needed correcting.
“We are those who have
intellectually disabled adult
children who live with us,
primarily because of a shortage of
places where t hey could l ive on
their own o r independently i n a
group home kind of situation,”
emailed one Maryland father. “To
find that we couldn’t get any kind
of dependent stimulus for our son
simply because of his age just
seemed wrong. We s pend a l ot of
out-of-pocket t o raise him, k eep
him safe, keep him healthy, k eep
him happy. Just l ike a parent with
a child under 18 does.”
But for folks l ike Brown, there’s
still t he i ssue of the f irst $5 00
payment, t he o ne promised in
March.
“When I heard that more
money may be c oming, I j ust
smirked,” she said i n an interview.
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
This is another s tumble in a
stimulus program that has been
plagued w ith glitches. The IRS
created an online non-filers tool
for Americans who earn too little
to file a tax return but are eligible
for a stimulus payment. For the
most part, the online tool h as
worked for people who needed t o
let the IRS know they are eligible
for stimulus funds. However, the
portal hasn’t w orked out well for
some p eople collecting f ederal
benefits such as Social Security
disability, Supplemental Security
Income or Veterans Affairs
benefits.
Although these federal
beneficiaries receive automatic
stimulus payments, t hose with
dependent children under 17 h ave
to use the non-filers tool to claim
the $500 payment.It j ust doesn’t
make sense t o
Cheryl Brown.
Why, i n the
middle of a
pandemic, w ould
Congress agree t o
send $ 500 to
people with
dependent
children but fail to
deliver money to
her, a mother with a
developmentally d isabled c hild?
Brown, 53, i s the s ingle mother
of 10 -year-old Aiden. She lives in
Cincinnati and receives $1,584 in
Supplemental Security Income to
care f or herself a nd her s on. An
extra $500 would help offset the
rising cost of food and having her
son home all day, w hich h as
increased her monthly utility bill.
But that check has not arrived.
Many o ther parents have
complained that while they
received their $1,200 stimulus
payment as part of the $2 trillion
Coronavirus Aid, Relief, a nd
Economic Security (Cares) Act,
they have n ot been sent the extra
$500 p romised for e ach
dependent child under 1 7.
And now Congress i s poised to
send a s econd round o f stimulus
payments. Brown doesn’t t rust
any of the dependent money will
reach her this year.
Republicans and Democrats
agree that more financial a id is
needed for A merican families.
This time around, the legislation
is likely to expand t he u niverse of
dependents eligible for t he extra
$500. Under the original Cares
Act, the dependent payment was
limited t o children u nder 17. The
new legislation, if passed, would
provide an a dditional $500 to
taxpayers with dependents of any
age, including college s tudents or
elderly p arents who are claimed
by their adult children on their
For people like this mother of a disabled child, another stimulus stumble
Michelle
Singletary
THE COLOR
OF MONEY
market, monopolies are only
temporary a nd that mergers
create efficiencies that are
reliably passed o n to consumers
in lower prices. Business
practices restricting customers or
disadvantaging competitors —
bundling products, exclusive
contracts, pricing restraints and
withholding services from rivals
— once considered anti-
competitive, are now assumed to
be pro-consumer. And in
deciding w hether t o block a
merger or outlaw business
practices, j udges no longer take a
broad l ook at t he competitive
landscape, but r ely o n technical
economic analyses of how much
prices will g o up or down.
A reformed and modernized
antitrust law would reject all of
these p resumptions, reversethose rulings and make clear that
under-enforcement of the
antitrust laws is a greater r isk to
the vibrancy of the American
economy t han over-enforcement.
For starters, there should once
again b e some b right lines t hat
should rarely, if ever, be crossed.
Companies w ith more than 40 or
50 percent market s hare should
be prevented from buying any
direct competitor, no matter how
small, to protect c urrent and
potential c ompetition.
Dominant firms in highly
concentrated markets should
also be barred from buying any
company i n an adjacent market,
particularly ones that are also
high concentrated. Such a
provision would have p revented
pharmacist CVS from buying
health insurer Aetna, the AT&Tphone company f rom buying the
cable c ompany Time Warner and
Ticketmaster b uying concert
promoter Live Nation.
In h ighly concentrated
markets, the legal burden should
be with the companies to
demonstrate that a merger or
business practice would not
reduce competition, r ather than
on the government to prove that
it would — a huge difference in
the world of antitrust litigation.
In a rguing its case, the
government would be required to
show only that a merger or
business practice poses a credible
risk of reducing competition, well
short of the current burden t o
prove t hat competitive h arm is
likely or probable, or all but
certain.
A 21st c entury antitrust lawwould also make clear t o judges
that the purpose of antitrust law
is to protect a nd enhance
competition not only because it
lowers prices, increases c hoice
and improves quality for
consumers, but a lso b ecause it
stimulates innovation, reduces
income inequality and reduces
the concentration of economic
and political power.
Recent court decisions, more
narrowly, have declared that
competition is enhanced by
anything that benefits
consumers, and w hat benefits
consumers is lower prices. But in
an economy i n which some
companies give away t heir
services free ( think Facebook and
Google), a merger or business
practice can reduce competition
without raising prices. And inPHOTOS BY CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai.markets where c ompanies serve
multiple sets of customers (think
credit card companies and their
cardholders and merchants),
what benefits some customers
might harm others. Judges need
to be reminded t hat economic
efficiency is not the holy grail.
“In the search f or
quantification and scientific
precision, economists have taken
to defining too n arrowly w hat
competition means and how it
should be measured,” said John
Kwoka, an economist at
Northeastern University.
A broader analysis of
competition would require
judges and regulators to consider
how U. S. prices compare to
foreign prices and how profit
margins company valuations
compare to those similar
industries. It w ould also look at
the pace of innovation in the
industry, t he degree of
competition among suppliers
and distributors, t he frequency
with which companies enter the
market, the power companies
have over workers and suppliers
and the prevalence of restrictive
business practices.
In a more aggressive antitrust
environment, firms justifying
acquisitions on the basis of
operating efficiencies and lower
prices would be required to
provide annual updates on
whether those efficiencies and
price d eclines were realized. That
would allow judges and
regulators to assess the reliability
of such claims, which i n most
cases are grossly e xaggerated.
And judges should be given the
authority to appoint i ndependent
economists to evaluate the
economic analyses submitted by
companies and regulators.
This would not be the first
time that Congress h as been
needed to step in to revive and
update the antitrust law — it
happened in 191 4, 1936, 1950 a nd- Given our polarized
political environment, it will take
a Democratic president and a
Democratic Congress to do i t
again.
There is urgency to this
project. As w e dither, European
regulators have already taken the
lead in trying to rein in the
business practices of the tech
giants, imposing billion-dollar
fines and prompting c omplaints
that their a im is to hamstring
their t ransatlantic rivals. As w e
are discovering with other policy
issues, the d ysfunction of our
public sector has begun t o
seriously erode the capacity of
our private sector to adapt and
innovate. The rest of the w orld i s
not about to wait while we get
our act together.
[email protected]
to restrain the tech giants. At this
point, only a major rewrite of the
industrial era antitrust statutes
can bring t he tech titans to heel.
The outlines of such a revision
are contained in a number of
written submissions made t o the
House antitrust subcommittee,
including one b y a dozen of the
country’s top antitrust
economists and lawyers who
conclude that “current antitrust
doctrines are too limited to
adequately protect competition
... o r stop anticompetitive
conduct.” They l ay o ut several
changes in the law to reverse a
series of court rulings that have
opened the door to over-
consolidation i n virtually every
sector of the e conomy, n owhere
more so than in tech, where there
is a natural tendency o f
customers to want use the s ame
software, c ommunicate on the
same network or transact
business on the same platform as
everyone else.
While this “network effect”
explains much o f the w inner-
take-all c ompetition in the tech
sector, mergers and acquisitions
have also played a role. The four
companies represented at
Wednesday’s hearings, a long
with Microsoft, have collectively
bought 720 companies over t he
past 30 years, according to
testimony from the A merican
Antitrust Institute.
Google’s p urchase of YouTube
and Waze, Facebook’s purchase of
WhatsApp and Instagram,
Amazon’s p urchase of Zappos
and Ring — all of these were
given t he green light by the
Justice Department and the
Federal Tr ade Commission.
Hundreds of other d eals were too
small even to be reviewed. In o nly
one of those 72 0 did the
government move t o block the
deal — Google’s p urchase o f
travel software firm ITA — only to
be rebuffed in court.
“We went from an antitrust
culture [in the 1970 s] where “ the
government always wins” to one
where e nforcers almost always
lost, or where fear of losing
caused the government not to act
at a ll,” wrote Bill Baer, who
headed the Justice Department’s
antitrust division during the
Obama administration, in his
submission to the House
subcommittee.
The economic p remise behind
the decades-long retreat from
antitrust enforcement — much o f
it originating at t he economics
departments o f the University of
Chicago and the law school at
George Mason University — is
that three f irms are sufficient to
provide competition in any
PEARLSTEIN FROM G1
STEVEN PEARLSTEIN
It’s time to rewrite industrial era antitrust statutes and reverse court rulings