To put things into perspective, the entire Wolton fortune, accumulated over decades, would bankroll the ongoing COVID lockdowns for about a week.
A relatively few lucky Americans may acquire a few million over their entire careers. I am a well paid developer who's had a number of good breaks and I hope to have that much some day for retirement.
215B is an unimaginable amount of wealth.
The real story would be how economies of scale and technological efficiencies, and now coronavirus lockdown effects have driven even more business to the already biggest businesses, and what to do about that.
This seems like something that is much more properly paid via broad-based taxation, not by seizing wealth from a small number of families.
"via serving the needs/wants of vast swaths of population" is completely false. The article was about inherited wealth. When you inherit wealth, you didn't serve the needs of vast swaths of the population. You were simply born to the right parents.
And of course, you’re comparing wealth accumulated over 50-60 years to a one time bailout. This likely won’t be the last pandemic of our lifetime. What’ll we do next time?
This is a hundred year pandemic. The worst pandemic since the 1918 flu. We save up during the good times just in case we need it during the bad times. So yes, spending wealth accumulated over the past decades is necessary now.
It’s not even as bad as previous Asian flu of 1957, so far.
"About 70,000 to 116,000 people died in the United States"
"The second wave, in January and February 1958, was more pronounced among elderly people and so was more fatal."
There have been over 150,000 deaths in the US in the first 7 months of the current pandemic. So no, you're incorrect.
Just stop.
I was arguing for a hard lockdown to stop the current increase in cases. I'm not sure how it even matters whether the final toll in 1958 was 70K or 116K or somewhere between. We know the current cases have been trending upward for the past month in the US. Without a lockdown, they're likely to continue trending upward.
I think it is reasonable to say that if we followed Swedish approach to COVID, we’d have similar outcomes. The epidemics in Sweden is mostly finished, they get few new cases and very few new deaths. If we had similar fatality rate to Sweden, we’d be looking at 200,000 deaths in the US. That’s an enormous, dizzying numbers. However, it wouldn’t be qualitatively different than 1957 Asian flu, and given how nobody has even heard of 1957 Asian flu epidemics, I claim that we wouldn’t have done such an enormous damage to livelihoods of hundreds of millions of Americans.
The cases in the US are going up, because this is how we go through with this whole ordeal. This is what happened in UK, Italy, Sweden, France, New York or New Jersey. They are now done with epidemics. Look at their graphs, despite relaxation of restrictions, case numbers are very low and flat or trending downwards. New York and New Jersey, with their absolutely disastrous policy of deliberately infecting nursing homes by forcing them to take COVID-positive patients, have most definitely resulted in very high death rates there compared to European countries. However, if instead of lockdowns, we pursued a sensible policy of protecting the most vulnerable, we’d be already done by now and could get on with our lives.
> The epidemics in Sweden is mostly finished
> This is what happened in UK, Italy, Sweden, France, New York or New Jersey. They are now done with epidemics.
This is just way off base.
"Five months into Europe's pandemic and only 6% of the population here is known to have antibodies, according to Swedish Public Health Agency research." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53498133
The rate is difficult to measure, but even if it's significantly higher than 6%, it's nowhere near the estimated 70% required for herd immunity.
Life has not returned to normal, anywhere. They're still social distancing in New York and New Jersey, and even in Sweden.
Bringing the new cases under control is not the same as ending the pandemic. In the county I live in, we had new cases very much under control, but then the local governments bizarrely decided to reopen bars and sit-down restaurants, along with many other businesses, and predictably the cases almost immediately started spiking again. We're not done by a long shot. There's no quick fix.
I think coming few months will prove me right: we will see more and more relaxation of lockdowns, without corresponding increase in cases, but only in places where the epidemics have already came on hard. Where it hasn’t been much of a thing, we will see many new cases and deaths, until those too will subside.