San Francisco flattened the curve early. Now, coronavirus cases are surging
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Clearly, nothing is going to change at the federal level so people have quarantine fatigue.
(Never mind all of the little bits of discouragement the federal government has been feeding down to states, eg threatening to withhold school funding)
2. Did any other country uniformly cancel all rent?
The US should have more leeway because it has the world's reserve currency.
I haven't worked it out but I'd like to hear why the Fed or Treasury (let's just say federal govt) couldn't simply replace lost real estate loan payments by adding to banks' balance sheets.
Other countries have more of a safety net, and less of an inflationary treadmill. A better safety net (eg continuing direct subsidies for the unemployed, and expanding them to cover small business rent) is another option, and probably the more practical one. But there is this American tendency to characterize such things as deliberate meddling with some default state of affairs. So I am mainly pointing out that this needing to feed the debt black hole is itself a result of explicit federal policy.
Non-mortgage landlords might hurt if they depend on the income. But that's not much different from other businesses whose income stream stopped, and the same rescue packages could be applied, e.g. furlough etc.
In the UK, rent was not stopped, but landlords were allowed to stop paying their mortgages. That seems unfair to me.
The feds, early on, initially declined to provide PPE from stockpiles, and then obstructed states who located their own PPE supplies (and other resources) and commandeered them, directing both originally federal stocks and commandeered stocks that were secured according to political affiliation rather than need, oversupplying (even compared to state requests) states with governors that were politically allied with the President and denying supplies to hard hit states whose governor's were members of the opposite major party. The federal government also directly I referred with virus control effort by using the Defense Production Act tomorrow to meat plant closures as large outbreaks were occurring in such facilities.
And, that's not the extent of the political game playing involved.
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/07/9942890/jared-kushn...
On top of that the biggest failing is the failure of federal aid to states; states largely have constitutional and practical limits that make borrowing for even extraordinary operating costs impractical or impossible, relying on the federal government (which is much less limited, both legally and because of its low cost of borrowing, which is kept down by being the currency issuer) for emergency deficit spending. Among other things, that's amounted to economic coercion for reopening, and that's been fairly overtly the reasoning Republican officials in both political branches of the federal government have given for not including such aid in emergency spending packages.
Clearly not but I don't understand how.
I have no idea if there are any travel restrictions in place internally to the Schengen area right now but I wouldn't be surprised if the free movement in the US between areas with very good control over the virus and area where it went haywire was a factor in the current spikes.
Hispanic people are greatly over represented in current coronavirus cases in SF [2], supposedly because they are more likely to be essential first-line workers, but I think also having to live in very cramped living situations (e.g. 5 people in a 2 bed apartment) is another factor. So in that case wealth inequality could be another contributing factor as to why cases are higher in the US than the rest of the world.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid [1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/15/tracking... [2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/health/coronavirus-hispanic-s...