I guess I don't understand politics because the last year should have have been both parties fighting to get credit by giving Americans more and more and more and more direct $ aid.

A lot of stimulus has actually happened! But it has been both unnecessarily complicated, bureaucratic, and an uphill fight to get it to happen

Both parties end up not liking direct cash payments to people because they don't trust the masses. But for different reasons
1) GOP thinks giving people $ will make them lazy
2) Dem thinks bureaucrats know better than the people themselves what to do with the money

In a nutshell, the political class (elites, front row, eggheads, whatever) just don't have faith in the people (the back row, the plebes, normies, whatever)

They think they need to be protected from their own bad behavior (laziness, or inefficiency, or bad financial skills, etc)

Honestly. Andrew Yang's campaign did a great job of making a lot of people, who generally don't follow politics closely, aware of how unnecessarily complex our social safety net is and how it could be different.