Normally, unemployment benefits will only pay for about enough to pay for basic necessities and maybe enough to pay for gas to go to job interviews. The enhanced unemployment benefits have
resulted in over 2/3 of people who lost their jobs making more on unemployment than they were making, softening the blow of losing their jobs. Last month, the economy added ~2.5 million jobs, when the expectation was nearly 8.5 million jobs lost, a swing of nearly 11 million jobs. Those that have a government-insured mortgage are able to receive 12 months of forbearance. I think most of the economic pain is going to be kicked past the election; I think this was probably by design.
The unemployment numbers are way too low. Tax withholding data shows a year-over-year reduction of 30% in April and 33% in May. This means that nation-wide total payrolls (including PPP-supported payrolls but not including unemployment payments) are down by roughly those measures. However, the BLS employment rate is down year-over-year only 14.9% in April and 12.5% in May. This makes me think that a whole hell of a lot of people -- much more than even the BLS acknowledges as being possible miscategorizations -- are being counted as employed in the unemployment number, but actually have substantially reduced hours or are somehow otherwise not counted as unemployed.
PPP is running out about now. The enhanced unemployment benefits end July 31. The $1200 payment is probably roughly spent now by the low-income people who relied upon it. If Trump wants to temporarily wallpaper over this problem until November, he needs to get congress to pump more stimulus into the economy soon, and probably even more than last time will be required. Otherwise I think that this is going to turn into a widespread economic disaster in the next couple of months. Some people think that the action by congress and the Fed bridged the pre-lockdown and post-lockdown economies, and the recovery will therefore be relatively complete, but I really doubt it: the economic damage done by the shutdowns was catastrophic, a lot of business will not be able to resume properly, and a lot of these jobs will not be coming back anytime soon. Any past or future stimulus will IMO only be opiates which temporarily delay the symptoms without actually reducing the total damage, and in fact they'll probably make the total damage worse.
Whoever Biden chooses to be VP will effectively be the president on Feb 1 2021 if Biden is elected. They will probably have the title of President by the end of 2024. I would reserve judgment until Biden announces his VP pick, however since effectively winning the nomination, Biden has been pulled further to the left by Bernie Bros, so who knows what kind of presidency a Biden administration would be.
I've thought from the start that it'll be Kamala Harris, and I still think so. This'll make the ticket even worse, since she's an authoritarian neoliberal who only cares about power.