The pessimist in me believes that this number will be used to prematurely force workers back to work, causing more illness and loss of work for those who choose not to return.
What I'm very curious about is the impact of super-spreader events. There's some indication that say 10% of activities are responsible for 90% of the infections, e.g. a football stadium, a concert etc.
What I wonder is, what does the distribution look like? 1% of activities cause 90% of cases, or 30/70?
And then, what happens to the R0 / infection rate, if you can ban/restrict those high-impact activities in particular? Does the coronavirus then start to mimic the impact of a much more benign issue such as the flu? Or would the effect be minimal, and does that mean that a second wave around august and follow-up lockdown is basically guaranteed?
That to me is what everything is banking on, with a vaccine 9-18 months away, markets will be butchered if we get a second wave+lockdown. If that doesn't happen, then unemployment figures / markets will probably recover relatively quickly given the relatively decent economic fundamentals going into this crisis, and the unprecedented government / central bank support packages.
You can't just claim your car is now an airplane and drive off a cliff. Nor will just attaching wings grant you the power of flight. You can alter a car into a functioning plane, but what do you have to sacrifice in order to make that work?
Canada and Germany seem to be managing just fine, and I pick those two examples because they have vastly different health-care systems.
That doesn't necessarily solve equality of care. Do we pay hospitals equally? Based on patients treated? Based on what is treated? Is getting treated for cancer in Beaumont, Texas the same as being treated for cancer in Cambridge? What about hospitals with poor outcomes - especially if those hospitals mainly serve minority populations?
This is an extremely complicated issue with a lot of side effects and at the end of the day you're going to treat one group or another unfairly to resolve it - and the group that is likely going to get the short end of the stick is the middle class who provides the bulk of tax revenue.
That might be viable in states like Florida or Nevada.
However, the most populous states have upper bracket state+federal rates that exceed 50% - so that well has already been tapped.
California, as you may know, has identical treatment for simple income and capital gains income, so even that avenue for tax expansion has already been opened up.
Hardly. The top marginal rate peaked at 94% in 1944. It didn't dip below 70% for the next three decades, either - and we still managed to have a golden era. We're hardly tapped out.
"The crisis of World War II led Congress to pass four excess profits statutes between 1940 and 1943. The 1940 rates ranged from 25 to 50 percent and the 1941 ones from 35 to 60 percent. In 1942 a flat rate of 90 percent was adopted, with a postwar refund of 10 percent; in 1943 the rate was increased to 95 percent, with a 10 percent refund."[1]
It's important to understand this historical - and exceptional - aspect to those marginal tax rates and not misconstrue them as a fantastically progressive tax policy.
Setting aside those exceptional, war-related circumstances, I am skeptical that income taxation above 50% is workable. One may indeed enact such a rate but even in the absence of (criminal) tax evasion, legitimate tax avoidance activities will keep us below that threshold - a threshold that I think many people associate with basic concepts of fairness.
People keep claiming that they're in favor of that. In fact, ~50% of the U.S. population votes Democrat, so we should be able to extrapolate that ~50% of the U.S. population supports an additional "feed the hungry" tax. However, if they were truly being honest, they could easily donate 10-15% of their own income to food banks/red cross/etc. which would actually be vastly more effective in assuaging poverty than a tax increase, even if only Democrats participated. The fact that I don't see that being done makes me question the validity of those suggestions.
I don’t see why this has to be true. I’m also not going to sacrifice my resources and be competitively disadvantaged because other people don’t want to pay taxes. I’m going to continue trying to vote for a government that reduces the wealth/income gap, but until the collective decides it and works toward it, it behooves me and my kids to play the game individually.
Ergo, we uncover the unethical basis of such position.
If your private life conflicts with your intellectual opinion, it cancels your intellectual ideas, not your private life.
and
If your private actions do not generalize then you cannot have general ideas
Also, philanthropy isn't a solution to systemic problems. It tends to focus dollars on the 'prettiest' problems -- it's not super attractive to donate to, e.g., portable toilet facilities. Aid programs ensure we're covering everything, including the ugly (or out of sight) problems.
In any case, in our system not a lot of people have to change their minds; just a few moderate voters in swing states could be enough.
They've just lost their healthcare. How can they not look at the rest of the world and say "Maybe they are onto something, not tying health care to employment..."
Let me guess: you already supported larger safety nets before this crisis.
The pessimist in me believes that social benefits will incentivize potential workers to stay home and not spend money which will slow down economic recovery.
What kind of social benefits?
Some kinds of travel businesses will of course not be opening in the near future.
I doubt this will happen because one half believes this is all a hoax perpetrated by the other half.
First, socialization and central planning at that scale is essentially communism, so start with that.
Second, if almost nobody is working, then 'stuff' doesn't get made, and you can't feed or house many people for long. We know from history, that even if people could work, the government isn't really good at organizing a lot of that kind of activity.
If we want 'food' for people there is no way around the fact we must have people doing all the various bits of work that get food to our plates: farms, delivery, processing, grocery, transport. And that system depends on everything else.
Of course, we need more than food - housing etc. depends on so much as well.
So the answer cannot be 'print money' because that literally doesn't do anything.
The answer has to be something along the lines of: 'how do we get back to work safely'?
There might be some long term opportunities with housing and healthcare, but there are already so many things screwed up there, that basic regulatory changes could yield massive opportunities long before even the argument for socialization begins. Outrageous hospital billing, odd zoning, bad labour laws etc.. So much low-hanging fruit.
This is the bit nobody gets.
Imagine how expensive gurney casters will cost when there like 100 million fewer casters being produced every year.
Edit: Also, providing social housing, universal health care, and basic food assistance isn't communism. France isn't a communist country, and yet they have access to those things. It's not a boolean flip between capitalism and communism -- we can have elements of both and tune it to what we'd like.
Thanks, but no thanks
Your pessimism is another persons optimistic outcome.
We no longer live in a world with shared truths, and this is the most remarkable manifestation of this new reality.
Ok, I googled it and I still don't get it... are you talking about the cartoon?
Duranty got the prize for being one of a very small number of Western journalists allowed into Stalin's Soviet Union, and writing about a visit to Ukraine.
He made no mention of the mass famine ongoing at the time, the Holomodor. Wikipedia lists the death toll as "3 to 12 million", because it was a totalitarian state and real measurement was impossible.
So the answer to "is it possible for millions to die and it simply not be reported at the time" is "yes".
These are positive outcomes of lockdowns being lifted.
The danger in looking at this as a binary “opening kills people” is that you miss the trade offs and in doing so you miss the other nuanced policy options that sit in between complete lockdown and no lockdown.