> It's been a month. We can absolutely make it through a few months if we have to, while they do their work.
You and I can. Many of my friends have missed a rent or car payment, and may soon miss another. Most people cannot work from home.
You and I can. Many of my friends have missed a rent or car payment, and may soon miss another. Most people cannot work from home.
In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.
The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.
Funny you say that because it seems to be no problem when it comes to bailing out corporate investors. Of course, near-zero federal interest rates didn’t make “economic sense” either, but yet here we are.
The term "bail out" is usually understood to mean replacing funds after the owner of them lost them through bad decision making. What's happening here isn't a conventional bailout. Governments have destroyed the businesses of private investors deliberately and explicitly - reductions in the damage aren't bail outs.
Bay area issued the first national stay at home order on March 13. By then demand had already dropped precipitously. If your restaurant is seeing 60% fewer bookings, are you going to keep as many wait staff? Are you going to order as much food? How is that going to impact your supplier? And their supplier?
On the flip side we have places like Smithfield food that stayed open and their workforce became infected. Smithfield alone has as many infected as the entire country of Sweden reported newly infected yesterday. These are problems of different orders of magnitutde. How does a factory stay open with 500 people infected at once?
And yet Sweden still disproves your point. Businesses have stayed open, including restaurants and other such businesses, and yet Swedish companies are not evaporating due to their workforces being too sick to work. That's not even close to happening, is it?
``` A record 36,800 people were handed their notice in March, more than 10 times the number from the same month last year.
The government has offered loans and guarantees and expects to increase expenditure by around 84 billion Swedish crowns ($8.35 billion) this year.
At the same time, the central bank has poured money into the financial system, offering 500 billion Swedish crowns in loans to companies via banks and boosting its purchases of securities by 300 billion crowns.
Banking group Swedbank said recently it expected the economy to contract 4% this year. ``` https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...
The U.K. government is also backing loans for businesses to limp on with, interest free for the first 6 months or year (I forget the specifics).
Of course it doesn't. Governments all over the world aren't making decisions for the benefit of the economy right now, they're doing it to save the lives of their citizens.
I.e. the US and UK have gone ahead wonderfully; the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, South Africa.. not so much
Yes, government isn't some omnipotent god but neither is it some helpless pathetic entity that can't sort things out at a time of extraordinary crisis.
My assumption is that governments are taking on some sort of debt here.
(Even if you hardly needed to before just by sheer size.)
What they have done is: - allowed companies who's income has dropped by 30% to claim $600/employee/week of salary support - negotiated with all the banks to allow mortgage holidays
Think of it as trickle up stimulus and trickle down rent subsidies to keep people connected to companies and as many companies as possible still viable
We're getting close to having Covid beat(only 5 new cases today, all from known sources), next week we slowly start dropping out of lockdown
So how does that work? Instead of right now, they'll get evicted and become homeless as soon as things open up, because they've been piling up rent with no income in the meantime? Would you find that comforting?
Honestly, because its unlikely that most people will be able to share the burden of theses costs and we need only look at 2008 to see how a financial crisis reduced people to forced evictions (of people who even owned their homes, no less) because of delinquency.
Personally, I want to believe we could do more as individuals, as relying on the Government for solutions isn't going to work.
I'd prefer to enact a local/community based approach for this pandemic but I have serious doubts as to how it will take place or who would actually honor them when its clear so many businesses (even large corporations) are insolvent in the US. not to mention the level of wide-spread ignorance as seen with these quarantine protests taking place.
I'm starting to really wonder, especially as this can easily lead to a global depression if hasn't already, if we will have to have a debt jubilee given the severity of COVID.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/debt-jubi...
This seems like a “prisoner’s dilemma” situation. It’s rational for an individual landlord to evict a delinquent tenant and seek a new one. However, if everyone does this the entire market collapses. It’s better for everyone if the landlord takes a short term haircut to preserve the market.
Since cooperation is expected to break down between individuals, the government must step in to prevent collapse.
Capital owners are not a special class of citizen. If you have assets and need cash, there is a way to convert one to the other. It's called a "market". You may have heard of it.
It seems that during recessions, asset-rich/cash-poor people, nominally Capitalists, turn into overnight socialists because making cuts to the ol' lifestyle is for the little people, not them.
Most Americans are broke, it's just not really talked about.
Sure, and I'm very aware of my privilege in that sense. If people have the choice of getting the disease or missing rent payments that is a social failing we should all be ashamed of. I also don't mean to ignore the global perspective. The U.S. is materially wealthy enough that we could take care of people who need help as we get through this. Other nations don't necessarily have the resources.
This is the statistical morality question that we're very bad at dealing with. Here, move this trolley switch lever. There's a 1/100 chance that doing so kills somebody. No, you can't tell whether it will, or even whether it did afterwards. Here's your cheque.
This makes me wonder if there might be some kind of eminent domain case to be made: If the government orders a business closed due to no fault of the owner/management, is that sufficiently similar to seizing the property that they owe some kind of remuneration for the action?