"Is life worth living if you're destitute and living in poverty or emotional turmoil?"
It sounds like you're saying you think maybe poor people should just die.
It sounds like you're saying you think maybe poor people should just die.
We can avoid this terrible trade-off by realizing it's a false choice. We don't have to trade lives for GDP. There is a third option.
We could take a lesson from Singapore, Taiwan and Korea.
We could test millions of people, even those with no symptoms. We could aggressively isolate the positives, and allow the negatives to get on with life, with common sense disinfecting, physical distancing and universal mask wearing.
There is a path out of this dilemma, but in the US it's pretty difficult to execute in the absence of national leadership, with every neighborhood, town, city, county and state left on their own to figure this out.
Covid-19 has already massively spread in the US, and it's just a matter of days before large amounts of the population become symptomatic. It's too late to do anything about what's coming, and what's coming is going to be really bad.
On one side we have health officials saying "for the love of god, keep the barriers up".
On the other, we have politicians saying "we waited as long as we can, send in as many people as we need to sweep up the supercritical plutonium, it 'won\'t make a difference now' if the PPE isn't there".
Who is to say who is right?
If you find yourself taking this thought seriously and you're in the US, you can call 1-800-273-8255. Please take care.
But say I assign utilities like this:
Alive+rich = 5 Alive+poor = 1 Dead = 0
So 50% alive+rich, 50% dead has utility 2.5, while 100% alive+poor has utility 1.
And guess what? Covid-19 kills mostly retirees.
So no, they probably wouldn't be losing their job in that scenario, unless of course their job is to take care of the old in some way.
The US came out of WW2 with an amazing economy.
Also this isn't a war.
And your augment is openly self defeating, since it takes 5 seconds to find out that 3% of the world population died in WW2, and slightly more than a minute to find out that 12.7% of the Russian population died - only for them to become a world super power immediately after the end of the war.
Are you arguing for bringing the economy back online?
3. A social support system that will keep non-essential workers in their homes, and keep them fed, until the emergency ends.
A particular political faction seems to be willing to sacrifice millions on their ideological altar, if it means avoiding option #3.
That social support system has to come from taking a slice out of the economy. And who is going to be paying for that social support system while the economy is shut down? There's no god of socialism who will simply rain infinite amounts of manna upon us in the form of debt just because we will it to happen.
Surely, you're aware that we're currently printing money hand-over-fist, to help corporations make ends meet in the short-term? We've already printed 1.7 trillion dollars, for this purpose, and that was entirely at the discretion of the Fed.
When the dust settles, and QE ends, many of those loans will not be made good on.
If a stroke of a pen by an unelected bureaucrat can parachute 1.7 trillion in corporate bailouts, surely, we can figure out how to make grocery bills for a few months.
Helicopter money is never acceptable if it is sent directly to households to ensure they keep spending. It's far preferable to allow the machine to seize up without oil.
This contradiction is somehow the bedrock of American fiscal policy.
You're referring to overnight loans made by the federal reserve to facilitate liquidity in the market. If you're not aware of the significance of the difference, this isn't the appropriate place to go over it.
Regardless, the stimulus package is going to have some form of social support in it. My point is just that it's not going to be a free win, it's more of a least bad option at this point. There's going to be long term economic and social damage from this even with the most generous of social support offerings.