Millions of Americans can't afford food, rent and other basics, report finds | Hacker News Reader

Millions of Americans can't afford food, rent and other basics, report finds

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86 pointshhs65 comments

I suspect shutting down such broad swathes of the economy is unprecedented even in wartime. Nobody has any idea what we are toying with here or what happens next.

It wouldn't be surprising if everything worked out well, and it isn't unthinkable that this ushers in the worst decade of chaos and suffering in the last 200 years. The economy is the most complicated machine we have and nobody knows what it is doing right now.

> worst decade of chaos and suffering in the last 200 years

Where in the world do you all come up with these statements?

that adds to sensational phrases msm uses

The point was that we don’t have any clue whatsoever what will happen because this has never been done before in human history.

No, we don’t, but that uncertainty doesn’t mean that it’s definitely an unprecedented calamity. This is not good, but how not good is yet to be seen and anyone who claims to know how things will shake out is lying or fooling themselves.

Nobody claimed anything, they said it was "not unthinkable".

I can't help but recall that the Great Depression and the resulting widespread poverty is considered by some historians to be one of the factors leading up WW2.

I would say the suffering, hyper-inflation and widespread poverty imposed on Germany by the allies after World War I was a stronger proximate cause for the rise of the Nazis and the war in Europe. A very depressing illustration of the proverb that you reap what you sow. WWI was a complex jostling for power of the kind that had always happened in Europe, but on a scale and devastation never before seen. If not sparked by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, it would have likely been sparked by something else. WWII, on the other hand, was probably entirely avoidable, if not for the Treaty of Versailles. At least in Europe.

Not sure about that. From what I understand, the German economy was recovering nicely and the Nazis were doing poorly in elections in the late 1920s. Then the Great Depression hit.

Nazi share of the vote in German federal elections from 1924 to the Nazi seizure of power in 1933:

  May 1924 -   6.5%
  Dec 1924 -   3.0%
  May 1928 -   2.6%
  Sep 1930 - 18.25%
  Jul 1932 - 37.27%
  Nov 1932 - 33.09%

I study WW2, so I'll delay my detailed comment and give a chance for somebody else to provide context for those stats.

Hint: There's lies, damned lies and statistics.

The Great Depression began with the crash of the American stock market in September of '29[0]. Your stats sure make it look like that was a major tipping point for support for the Nazis.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression

unemploymemt in Weimar 1932 was 30%.

umemploymemt in the Reich in 1936 was 1%.

like some wise economist said "it's the economy, stupid."

i hear today US unemployment is 30+% and will hit 45% by July. i guess if America was ever going to repeat the steps from Weimar to Reich, that time is now.

what was Hitler's formula for his economic miracle? it was dead simple.

1. default on the War Debt (owed to America)

2. pour over 50% of GDP in the re-armament in preparation to go to War.

America is -$27 trillion in debt now. if we start ramping up the war machine to test drive the eagle against, oh, say, Chy-na, then start to worry about the new Weimar to Reich tramsition.

may you live in interesting times.

Wow, that's pretty marked. I think there could be something to that theory then. I'd like to see more context around that before I'm convinced though.

Sounds like how we're treating IRAN/Cuba/others w/ sanctions during a pandemic. I guess we'll reap what we sow again if we keep it up. Seems when you do bad things it comes back to bites you in the ass.

If you wanna go that route, then actually, the Spanish flu is what led to the WW2. ;-)

US President Woodrom Wilson cam down with flu, had a stroke and early retirement from public life. So he couldn't persuade US govt to join the newly formed League of Nations or ratify the Treaty of Versailles. He didn't support punitive measure against German state. Since US was no longer part of process, German paid hard. Hyper inflation took hold, 4marks to a dollar ended up 4 billion marks for a dollar. That hardship and resentment is the environment the fueled Hitler and brought him support. Interesting reading, "The Spanish Flu epidemic and it's influence on history"

i bet Hitler never once forgot about the period of time between 1911-1915 when he was impoverished, unemployable and homeless.

it's funny how a cruel and exploitive economy tends to backfire when the one wrong guy is crushed by it, and then dedicates his life to overthrowing that economy.

This argument elides the fact that the US government is giving away plenty of money that these people could use on food and rent. They are just giving it to people who don’t need it.

While you’re busy arguing that the shutdown is the problem, our government is literally giving the taxpayers’ money to billionaires.

I mean, this is literally the problem. We had a ton of money pumped into the stock market which went directly into the hands of wealthy shareholders and just the other day when someone brought up the idea of doing UBI at minimum, people asked 'but how are we going to pay for it'.

It's only going to get worse too as places reopen and workers are forced to either go back to work and risk their health or lose their unemployment.

Im sure someone on HN has explained this before, but why are the markets steady and rebounding when the actual state of the US economy is so dire??

I've been waiting on that promised $1200 check for 2 days shy of an entire month now, and every day that passes I see another bar or clothing store or furniture outlet with boards up on the windows.

> why are the markets steady and rebounding when the actual state of the US economy is so dire?

Because everything anyone involved in the markets has ever told you is a complete lie.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

What, exactly, was unsubstantive about that comment? I'm flabbergasted that after what the market has done in the last couple of months, especially given the OP, that anyone is under the impression investors have any idea what they're doing.

Please, everyone tell me some more about it all being "priced in."

Not to speak for dang, but such a broad and potentially inflammatory assertion typically warrants references or at least some elaboration on how you came to that position

Including people on HN. /s

How it was explained to me is that the markets don't always reflect the economy because the negative outcomes have already been priced in. So, if the markets were expecting a downturn in the economy of -20%, but the economy actually went down -15%, then the market might go up, even though the economy is still doing worse.

Another possible explanation is that we're currently print a lot of money without producing much stuff. So, inflation should be happening, right? But people can't really consume any goods or services. And so it's the prices of investments that gets inflated. (this explanation is a bit more iffy to me though than the first)

My feeling is that investors have steadier hands now after they've witnessed the 10+ year rally after the 2008 crash. No one wants to be left out. Eventually though the market will catch up with what's happening on the streets (unless the fed keeps pumping money in).

The DOW dropped almost 13% on March 16th. That's the biggest single day drop since 1987. How is that evidence of investors having steady hands? Multiple market volatility trading circuit breakers have been tripped since the crisis started. How is that evidence of investors having steady hands? All I see is an extremely complex system with the ability to be reactionary, irrational, and volatile.

Single day drops are anecdotal. Overall drops in S&P500 are much lower, so far, then they were during the 2008 crisis. I’m saying “so far” because eventually the stock market will catch up to what’s happening outside. It’s just that in 2008 economic activity did not come to a halt like now and yet the stock market saw a larger impact.

I think that the sentiment today is that governments and central banks will not allow the market to collapse for as long as they can (a point which no one can really point at).

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/nomura-only-machines-are-b...

You will get 100 different answers. I like the argument that inflation is actually high, but our outsourcing of goods that make up the consumer inflation algorithm to cheaper countries makes it seem like inflation is low, but goods that can't be outsourced (education, housing, startup unicorns, financial assets like stocks) were eating the excess inflation that had no other place to go.

So the real value of stocks is lower when adjusted for true inflation, but everyone claims inflation is minuscule / nonexistent so we can pretend that printing trillions of dollars and handing it to banks is having no effect.

It's expected that there is some pullback after that first leg down. Expect a second. Right now we are practically mirroring the chart from 2008, if you want to see where we are at.

The market doesn't reflect the health of your local businesses. It's largely chains and massive corporations that are publicly traded. Between the fed's $1.5T injection in the markets and the $500B bailout/loans for corporations, you can see how the numbers might not look too bad from Wall St's disconnected perspective. Today a lot of companies were announcing their numbers and matched ~ expected earnings. Q1 wasn't 100% trashed by Covid. Q2 might be a lot more interesting especially if the shelter in place lingers towards the end of the summer which would not surprise me. The modern American society has put a ridiculously disproportionate value on capital vs individual which is driving the dissonant signal from the stock market. People could be dying of hunger, but if the SP500 companies kept their numbers in line with expectation, the "stock market" would be green all over...

Kind of a tl:dr, the market is ahuman and possibly anti-human.

And yet, as a human, that's probably where you should put your retirement savings.

I think we won't see a true adjustment until earnings reports come in from a "full covid" quarter. At that point, unless PE ratios skyrocket, prices simply have to come down.

The simplest explanation is that the stock market is a marketplace of buyers and sellers. There was a big selloff in March, then we ran out of people willing to sell. How do you price, say, Google? Or Nike? Or anything? There is too much disagreement on how things should be priced for any shares to change hands until we have more information.

If you know better than the market you should buy some puts!

Sounds like a sure thing!

This always seems a bit circular to me? If you participate, then you are in the market, and you become part of its efficiency. Ergo, you are correct.

I'm no expert, but this is the explanation I heard, and it makes sense to me:

You're judging the market by looking at the indexes. The DOW is 30 large companies. The S&P 500 and Russel 3000 are weighted proportionally to how large the companies are. Even the "small" companies in these indexes are larger than your local restaurants or misc goods / services businesses. The majority (maybe all) of these large companies will easily survive, and many of them are going to scoop up all the customers from the mom and pop shops that will fail because they don't have an aisle of "essential" goods to legally remain open.

Now, if you're retired and need to live on your savings for the rest of your life, where would you put your money? All the people who think the forced shutdowns hurt the wealthy really don't get it.

Goes without saying, but it is shocking how quickly the world has changed. The easy take would be that a lot of people are finding out how the other half lives, without easy access to healthcare or using credit cards to pay bills, but the poorer are disproportionately affected.

The only positive, if there is one, is the ability to really consider how our societies operate, how dangerous apathy and incompetence are and for tech workers more specifically, to realize how much of an impact our work has.

The next time someone wants to act like they know what the future looks like, remind them to have some humility. Be safe yall. This too shall pass.

Sorry but I can't help but remark on the contradiction in your last paragraph... Nobody knows for sure what the future will look like, but don't worry, you know that this too shall pass and things will go back to normal.

Just reminding you to have some humility.

> you know that this too shall pass and things will go back to normal.

No, we don't. Who knows if this coronavirus will ever truly go away? What will the new "normal" be like when—if—things truly settle down. Surely our world will be forever marked by this event.

I wonder if people in 1918 thought the same thing. And then the only impact the Spanish flu had on me was it was mentioned in passing in outdated middle school "social studies" books.

That's not true at all. The Spanish flu outbreak had a ton of impact on the modern world. Health codes, science around vaccines, economic effects, etc. To act like the Spanish flu had no long lasting effects shows you didn't pay much attention in middle school social studies.

No need to be rude. You had a point and then sullied it.

I didn't. But it doesn't mean the books did it justice either. Anyway, I was trying to illustrate GP's point of getting back to normalcy, albeit vaguely.

> Surely our world will be forever marked by this event.

Yes, it will leave a mark during our lifetime, but that doesn't mean forever. People quickly forget about terrible events, which is a blessing and a curse. Nobody remembers that much about the Spanish flu, and yet it was one of the deadliest pandemics known to mankind. This pandemic is dramatic and unprecedented in our lifetime, yet nobody can tell how that will affect us in the long term.

There are vested interests to come back to normal as fast as possible. And there are also incentives to use this crisis to push all kinds of agendas. I'd be wary about predictions.

Some events permanently change the course of history, forever. Like the second world war, or the European discovery of America.

> Who knows if this coronavirus will ever truly go away?

Wait, what?

I keep hearing this notion floated around and I'm honestly very confused.

Are people under the impression that our lockdowns are going to eradicate this? Or are you using "going away" as a metaphor for "will recede to the background level of death from flu/etc that we have learned to tune out?"

It should be stunningly obvious that a highly infectious respiratory disease that is present in every country, originally came from animals and has shown the ability to infect other animals will never be eradicated. There's too many reservoirs, even if the totalitarian dream that everyone seems to want were a full reality.

If you meant the other sense, then it should be equally obvious that this will eventually pass through the population and we will build immunity to it, at which point Covid-19 joins the friendly cast of characters such as the common cold coronaviruses, common cold rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, influenza, etc. In short, a disease that kills people but not in numbers that we freak out about. (And incidentally once the globe has been exposed to it it should be much less deadly than Influenza since new humans will be exposed to it as babies/young children and not as 80+ year old nursing home patients, and Covid simply does not kill young children in significant numbers)

What's that? Do I hear the "There's no evidence for immunity to covid-19" crowd in the distance? I'm getting a bit tired of that line, but if someone wants me to dismantle that argument (again) I am happy to.

> It should be stunningly obvious

> it should be equally obvious

Clearly it is not obvious, considering most people have never spent a significant amount of time thinking about how infectious diseases work.

> What's that? Do I hear the "There's no evidence for immunity to covid-19" crowd in the distance? I'm getting a bit tired of that line, but if someone wants me to dismantle that argument (again) I am happy to.

Why make a snarky, coy comment like this? If you have something to say about immunity then just say it. In fact the WHO are among those who make this claim[0], so "dismantle" away.

[0]: https://www.who.int/news-room/commentaries/detail/immunity-p...

"immunity" is a bit of an imprecise term. There's two major components:

(1) The presence of active circulating antibodies, which in sufficient concentrations should result in literal immunity in the sense of inability to catch the virus

Eventually those circulating antibodies will no longer be actively present, but you'll still have

(2) Memory B Cells which lie dormant, waiting for exposure to viral antigens at which point they ramp up antibody production like crazy.

So in the worst case scenario, immunity in the sense of inability to be infected disappears after X months, but any infection would be much milder and would clear much more quickly than normal with lower peak viral load.

Let's talk about "herd immunity" while we're at it since that's been branded as a "dirty word (phrase)". Herd immunity is just the logical consequence of individual immunity as applied to population-level dynamics. So people that don't "believe" in herd immunity are like people that don't believe in evolution, in that both logically follow from the ground truths.

Nothing I've said there contradicts the WHO, but it's worth mentioning that at this point it seems inaccurate to say "there is no evidence" rather than to say "there is not overwhelming evidence", and they've sort of given themselves away with this line:

> People who assume that they are immune to a second infection because they have received a positive test result may ignore public health advice

So, as always, they carefully shape statements to try to control behavior.

Anyway, I'm actually not trying to argue against the WHO here, but rather the hordes of people who trot out the "we don't know if there even is immunity" to try to argue that "herd immunity" is a foolish/dangerous proposition when the truth is that it's how we deal with every non-containable pandemic. That is what I was getting at with my needlessly snarky and coy comment.

BTW, just to be clear, vaccines rely on the same principle. So those who point to the uncertainty as an argument "against" herd immunity (which again to me is like arguing "against evolution" since both herd immunity and evolution are logical consequences of some simple ground truths taken to their logical conclusions), are also arguing against hunkering down for 2.5 years while we develop a vaccine.

Just to support your argument, according to Wikipedia only one human disease has ever been eradicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_dise... It is thus unlikely that Covid will be eradicated, and much more likely that it will be endemic. My best guess is that when people talk about Covid being "eradicated" they are making a mistake and really mean something like "there is a vaccine"...

Yeah, I think that's what many people mean. Although I have actually talked to a terrifyingly high number of people in real life who really do think that the goal of the lockdowns is to eradicate the disease. And it's not surprising given the absolutely unclear and misleading messaging from our public health officials who appear to be more concerned with mass social control than with actual evidence-based public health policy. But now I'm ranting again...

> The easy take would be that a lot of people are finding out how the other half lives...

...and that the market has already priced in the uncertainty. So long as the expected value improves, the markets can weather a long tail of suffering absent political upheaval that might change the game.

The media has spent years trumpeting that things are broken and precarious. That many folks cannot pay their mobile phone bills or cable bills or credit card bills at the first hint of a downturn is not news.

Can't afford food? Between food stamps and eating for $1.50/day (source- https://efficiencyiseverything.com/eat-for-1-50-per-day-layo...) I don't think the problem is the cost of food.

Rent, sure. Health insurance, sure. Food? Not the major expense, especially with food stamps.

A lot of people live in so-called "food deserts" [1]. That means they don't have access to fresh produce or bulk ingredients like milk, flour, eggs, beans, rice, pasta, or potatoes. Instead, they're stuck with convenience store food which is mostly junk food.

If they wanted to buy healthier food they'd have to travel a long way to reach a grocery store, a problem greatly exacerbated for those who do not own a car. It's not easy to carry home 10lbs of potatoes and 10lbs of beans by public transit, let alone on foot.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

They define "food desert" as 10 mile distance. I don't know how many of those 23 mil. don't have any means of transportation, but most probably do, in which cases 10 mile is just 10-20 minutes of driving away.

by comparison, I'm in greece and no matter where I go in this city, there's always little shops with fresh vegetable ad fruit withing a 5 minute walk tops

People are going hungry because they live in food deserts. The GP has proved this and you dismiss it. Why would people make this argument if people weren’t actually going hungry?

From the Wikipedia article (emphasis mine):

>In 2010, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that 23.5 million Americans live in "food deserts", meaning that they live more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas.[6]

Food stamps in some states are almost impossible to get.

I haven't had much luck finding milk, flour, eggs, or rice in stores unless I go at 6am. I'm not sure the state of appying for food stamps right now, but it can't be great. For unemployment, it took my friend over 3 weeks to get their unemployment debit card, and he only got it because it was sent by mistake to his neighbors house who kindly hand delivered it. California EDD is so backed up, and you can't really call them or contact them in any way right now.

Food stamps come with a whole bunch of restrictions on what you can and cannot buy with it. Want a big jug of milk to save and you need a big one anyway cause you have kids? Nope, the only approved milk is the half gallon, etc. etc. So for some people, while it might not be the top #1 problem it's def up there.

I don't think that's true, WIC is the one with restrictions like that. You can buy any food with food stamps. Certainly there is no restriction on any kind of milk.

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