WATCH: Morning Joe’s Steve Rattner Argues Against Biden Covid Relief Plan Because ‘Most Americans Are Still Doing Pretty Well’

Morning Joe conducted a wealthy white panel discussion on the excesses of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid relief proposal that was capped off by Steve Rattner opining that the bill was too expensive when “most Americans are still doing pretty well.”

On Tuesday morning’s edition of the MSNBC morning news chat mainstay, host Joe Scarborough and his panel seemed acutely aware of the optics at play in opposing an immensely popular relief package, with Richard Haas even laughingly noting that he fully expects to be savaged on social media.

But that didn’t dissuade them from deriding Biden’s “American Rescue Plan” as “untargeted” and in need of paring down. And it was multimillionaire Rattner who capped off the segment by claiming that Americans are mostly doing fine, and don’t need so much stimulus.

“It’s been very interesting to watch because there was a point in time where you thought well maybe some sensible people would get involved and cut the price tag a bit, they’d make it more targeted,” Rattner said, speaking from a tastefully-lit home art gallery. “But now the political impetus, the political pressure, all seems to be in one direction.”

“There’s nothing really in this bill to fix the fundamental issues of the American economy,” he complained, adding that “there’s nothing in there for infrastructure, there’s nothing in here for climate, and so forth. It’s really simply pouring money at the problem.”

“Only 1 percent of this entire 1.9 trillion-dollar bill is actually going for vaccines, the rest is going for things like checks to individual Americans, and even under the revised house proposal, something like 85 or 88 percent of Americans will get some kind of a stimulus check,” Rattner said. “Not always the full amount, but a significant stimulus check for no particular purpose, when most Americans are still actually doing pretty well. It’s really the ones who have lost their jobs and suffered from this are the ones we should be focusing on.”

Earlier in the segment, Rattner cited a 5 percent overall increase in personal income in 2020, a stat that the Bureau of Economic Analysis literally says is not targeted enough to judge the effects of the pandemic.

The Bureau’s website says, “The full economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be quantified in the personal income and outlays estimate because the impacts are generally embedded in source data and cannot be separately identified.”

But contributing to that stat was a trillion-dollar increase in billionaire net worth during the pandemic, a growth of 34 percent. Meanwhile, eight in 10 Americans say the relief bill is either the right size or needs to be even larger.

Watch the clip above via MSNBC.

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