Washington (AFP)

Political tensions between Democrats and Republicans in the run-up to the presidential elections jeopardize the vote on a new plan to help Americans while many of them are still unemployed.

Elected officials from both sides accuse each other of not coming to the aid of the Americans by electoral calculation before the November ballot, so that neither side can claim the success of the negotiations.

And the possibility that there will be no new aid by then can no longer be ruled out.

After more than a month of fruitless negotiations, Republican senators had proposed a new plan of 500 billion dollars.

The Democrats, who believe that $ 2.2 trillion is a minimum, were immediately opposed, and blocked it Thursday during the vote, deeming it "more than insufficient", and even "completely unsuitable" to come to the aid to the millions of Americans hit by the effects of the pandemic and unemployment.

Republicans accuse them of blocking aid for schools, testing, vaccines, unemployment insurance and small and medium businesses.

New government aid is however deemed crucial by economists to restart the world's largest economy, after a titanic plan of 2.2 trillion dollars, the CARES law, adopted at the end of March by the Trump administration and Congress, and extended by 500 billion at the end of April.

The Republicans then decreed a "pause".

- 29 million people -

The text rejected Thursday by the Democrats notably proposed new aid of $ 300 per week for millions of unemployed Americans, against $ 600 per week approved by the two parties in a previous aid plan now obsolete.

This assistance, which gave a major boost to economic activity in the late spring, ended in August.

It has been replaced temporarily by 400 dollars a week fixed by a decree of Donald Trump and paid only in states that wish it.

However, the number of new unemployed remained stable over a week, with 884,000 new registered between August 30 and September 5, according to figures released Thursday by the Labor Department.

More than 13.3 million people were receiving unemployment benefit at the end of August, up from the previous week.

And in total, more than 29 million people are on unemployment or other help after losing their jobs or seeing their income fall.

This is "disappointing", commented Rubeela Farooqi of High Frequency Economics, stressing that the level of unemployment claims "remains extraordinarily high".

"It is particularly worrying that the pace of layoffs has not slowed further, as activity has picked up more widely and more and more companies are working online," she adds.

- Still numerous dismissals -

President Donald Trump was delighted that the unemployment rate fell far more than expected in August, from 10.2% in July to 8.4% last month.

But the job market remains much weaker than before the pandemic: for example, it has 11.5 million fewer jobs than in February.

"The failure of elected officials to adopt another tax aid package poses significant risks for the economy and the labor market," said Nancy Vanden Houten, of Oxford Economics, in a note.

According to her, "the figures show that despite job creation and the fall in the unemployment rate in August, layoffs remain numerous and the job market remains in a fragile position at a critical time."

Unemployment had exploded with the containment measures, peaking at 14.7% in April.

It has retreated significantly since then, but the decline is now expected to slow, US Central Bank (Fed) Chairman Jerome Powell recently warned.

Indeed, he explained, the jobs destroyed in the spring and which have still not been recreated will be "the most difficult to find because certain sectors of the economy will take longer to recover".

© 2020 AFP