Hacker News Reader

We've long been pursuing the supply side economics for far too long. Massive tax cuts and bailouts. Banks came back rather quickly after 2008. The citizens, well, it took a while.

I'm beginning to think that if businesses can't survive for 6 months in a catastrophe, maybe it's better that they die. Moral hazard, you know.

If businesses die, you still have the people to build more businesses. If people die, you'll have neither.

That's an awful lot of people's life savings in their small business that goes poof. A lot of the businesses that can't survive are leaving behind people that are not capable of bringing them back, and people that won't be employed there afterwords.

So a lot of people's life savings have gone poof, not just small businesses.

The staff can be put on unpaid leave since they're getting paid by the government and the rents could be negotiated since the landlord should be getting their mortgage payments paused. I believe those are the main expenses for a brick-and-mortar business.

In Australia today banks will freeze small business customers' loan repayments for up to six months. If you can extend this to rent and other business repayments then many of them should survive.