The US government should be providing most Americans with $2,000 per month, for at least six months, to help them through the deepening economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Democratic congressman and one-time presidential candidate.

The $1,200 checks that the federal government has authorized for most Americans thus far just isn’t enough for them to manage through what has quickly become a depression-level economy, said Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), who briefly made a try for the Democratic presidential nomination before dropping out.

The $2,000 payments would be for at least six months, for everybody who makes less than $130,000 a year as an individual and $260,000 as a couple, Ryan said in an interview on the Fox Business Network.

Much of the US economy has been frozen for weeks, as states have had stay-at-home orders in place to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the United States there have been more than 860,000 reported cases of COVID-19, including 48,816 deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The number of Americans who have filed for unemployment over the last five weeks is 26.45 million, a number far exceeds the 22.442 million jobs added to payrolls since November 2009, when the U.S. economy began to add jobs back after the recession.

“It’s a shot in the arm that the average person needs and … they’ve done in Canada and if you want to have a u-shaped recovery, you better have a bunch of people who have paid their bills, pay their mortgages, pay their auto loan, pay their credit card bills and have money in their pocket to go out and spend,” Ryan said, adding, “We are talking about putting working-class people working poor into the front of the line for once.”

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