States reject Trump talk of restarting U.S. economy early

Nobody seems to be talking about the elephant in the room: the president's raging conflict of interest. He owns a major equity stake in a business that is being harmed by the public health response to the pandemic, and his actions are what you'd expect from someone who prioritizes that business over the interests of public health.

This is exactly why previous presidents have put their assets in a blind trust. We shouldn't have to question whether the White House is more concerned with their personal bottom line than the public interest, but here we are.

“If you ask the American people to choose between public health and the economy, then it’s no contest. No American is going to say accelerate the economy at the cost of human life” - Cuomo

Unfortunately, this just isn't true. Is life worth living if you're destitute and living in poverty or emotional turmoil? Won't a strong economy increase the pace at which we develop and produce life saving technologies?

At a certain point of economic ruin, I think many people will choose a strong economy over saving lives. The question is more so what the tipping point is. It seems hard to quantify and compare the total impact a strong economy has versus lives saved, but I think it's definitely worth having the conversation. Ultimately, this is a value judgment so there's no objective answer.

It seems obvious that we will have depression anyway, even if we "go back to normal" now: when everybody knows someone who died, and when hospitals won't help you because they are already full, people will stop planning for a vacation, and start saving money.

So the only realistic choice is (major depression) vs. (major depression + many people dies). There's no way out without economic turmoil now; the ship has sailed a month ago.

Imagine if a competent leadership partnered with companies to design and deliver test kits for the majority of the population. Just like a 23andme kit. Turns up at your door. Gets turned around. We have an actual idea of hotspots, and can design treatment plans. Making decisions with actual data. As opposed to this unmitigated shitshow.

I had to go to the hardware store to get protective gear for my wife, who is a doctor at a hospital with none.

My Proposal: Set a 3% limit on credit card interest for the next six months. If a credit card company complains, nationalize it. Use the six months to set up a debt-forgiveness plan that works for middle and low income earners. At the end of six months, consider lifting the limit incrementally.

Get spending power into the hands of common people and ease the cash-crunch anxiety immediately, without any stupid one time payments that will be too late, won't be large enough to help, and require the entire legislative branch to agree.

I want to see hard numbers of monetary and supply relief given to each state by the federal government.

I think Trump is in a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't predicament.

He _could_ enforce a federal 18-month lockdown and wait for a vaccine to become available (assuming that we _can_ make a vaccine for this within the timelines proposed). As software engineers, we know that we almost always optimize for Big-O, so assuming that the US will be effectively shut down for 18 months is probably the best way to model this, especially since waves of people seem to become symptomatic at different times. I don't have hard data to back this, but I don't think the US could afford to keep millions of people fed and housed for that long, and recovering from that is likely to take WAY longer than us finding a way to control this virus. This could cause us to lose our global hegemony and have dire long-term effects.

He _could_ also basically say "yolo" and keep the US running at full force. People's jobs will be protected and society will continue to function...until people start dying en masse because herd infection happens before herd immunity. The stats tell us that people are _more than likely not_ going to die from this, but more people could die if hospitals run out of capacity and protective gear.

In either case, we don't know when hospitals will run out of capacity, though we _think_ that this will happen sooner to much sooner if we cover our ears and pretend that things are fine.

Also, this is a completely unique situation since we haven't had a large scale pandemic like this before aside from smaller-scale ones like SARS or MERS and the last big one happened in a completely different generation.

I have my opinions about our current administration, but I would not want to be Trump right now because this sounds like a vortex of suck.

It's easy to say Trump is crazy when you're a privileged tech worker who can work from your nice home office and not worry about money running out or the unemployment line.

Meanwhile, in the real world, we can't shut down the global economy for months without dire consequences. Shortages, civil unrest, total anarchy are the next things coming if we keep this shutdown going. If you're not a fan of violent crime, or don't have a lot of guns, I'd recommended considering opening the economy sooner than later.

Here is a measured piece by an actual expert. We need to start getting the least vulnerable back to work and school, while keeping the most vulnerable isolated. Eventually we can let everyone out, but we need to keep the gears moving in the meantime.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/facing-co...

Can somebody link me to where this 15 day shutdown was declared? I can see many articles talking about Trump walking it back but none about it actually being declared or what it entails.

Cuomo's briefing today was absolutely scathing. NY State has 25,000 cases and is rising unabated and the federal government is doing next to nothing to support them while publicly seeking to move on from emergency measures. Trump is looking for a >$1T stimulus bill and unlimited Fed bond purchases but thinks that applying the Defense Production Act would be government overreach. People are dying and he only cares about goosing the stock market.

EDIT: The briefing on YT -> https://youtu.be/eD1eg3vMO2A

The president's actions, specifically his lack of action, are a huge part of why the pandemic is so bad in the US. I hope people remember that he is the reason for the late action, the bungled tests, the lack of cdc funding, the lack of preparedness and stockpiles. And ultimately, he is the reason we will have way more deaths that could have been prevented. Even now we don't have the proper testing capability. We don't have masks and the government is still lying about their effectiveness. 60k testing kits is nothing. He's still not doing what he could and should. I'm glad states are no longer listening to this administration. Doing that would kill a lot more people. Trump and his administration can go fuck themselves. And at this point, so can the people who still stand behind this president who is so callous to so many Americans dying. It's almost impossible to imagine a worse response than what has happened. I hope the markets do not recover before the election as, unfortunately, the mass unnecessary suffering and deaths of Americans will likely be forgotten by many voters if they do.

It saddens me that even in a crisis like this, people are being political and taking sides!

Neoliberalism is a death cult. Look at its high priests demanding sacrifice to Moloch! The vast majority of economic activity is absolutely useless to maintain essential supplies, infrastructure and services. Very few people have to work to keep society intact while we ride out the pandemic. Recession caused by a drop in activity is easy to fix provided you manage debt obligations in the interim. That can be a delicate dance but it is well within the means of modern capital.

All of these problems are ideological. You see people in these threads lately who literally cannot imagine anything possible outside of the status quo and are willing to sacrifice the vulnerable to get it back. If you break the facade that debt obligations are a moral obligation and not a social construct whose relevance in extraordinary circumstances is marginal, a central pillar of free market ideology collapses. At this point I'm not sure if it's a charade being pushed to its absurd extreme or if the ruling class and their sycophants' brains are completely hollowed out by ideological brain worms.

What's "early" and when, in the opinion of Reuters, would it not be too "early"?