One-third of American renters expected to miss their August payment
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This "waiting for things to return to normal" looks pretty dumb to me. I think the stimulus checks and other relief funds are smarter than just throwing a third of Americans out into the street, but it's not really a long term solution. A long term solution is the economy needs to adapt and we need to create work opportunities and reshape work with more of an eye towards germ control.
I've been trying to write down some of my thoughts about how we move forward in a sensible way. For example:
Earlier this year I wrote about a work opportunity I know of and about my opinion that this model should be borrowed for other kinds of work. That piece is here:
http://writepay.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-textbroker-solution...
I also wrote about my thought that more eateries need a contactless takeout option similar to Little Caesar's pizza portal:
https://projectsro.blogspot.com/2020/07/pizza-portal.html
I'm very frustrated at the kinds of things I see other people saying. We need to stop framing this as an either/or thing: Either we protect ourselves from the virus or we go back to work.
We need to do both. We need to figure that out. We aren't even trying. This assumption that we need to choose one or the other is part of the problem. It's not true.
My opinion is that there are a number of business models which are simply untenable in the current pandemic and taxation climate, like water-front bars. Many people are 'sticking' to these troubled businesses, with hopes of improvement; the reality is that their tax obligations, facility costs (including rent/mortgage), and general cost structure will not allow them to survive.
For the 3 trillion CARES; the U.S. probably could have funded it for this year easily, but companies would fund it on their own in the future.
Depending upon where you get your numbers there are 18-31 million unemployed right now. Some of that will be solved by brains -- people who can find niches and what not. But with a 1/3 of the renters who won't be able to make the August check, that's just a bunch of people who can't afford to spend money at all.
So demand is purely in the trash right now.
So the question is, if you could get 18-31 million people in gig positions, what would happen?
Well for one thing the pay would be low, because the supply for labor (unemployed people) would be more then plentiful to meet current demand.
E.g. How many uber drivers do we really need right now? And if you doubled or tripled the amount of uber drivers what happens to the income for one uber driver? That would drop by basically by 1/3, as more uber drivers compete for the same amount of rides. And more and more uber drivers are willing to take less money for the same effort.
The result is you have an uber driver making less income and less willing to spend money. And that starts a vicious cycle. More and more people not willing to spend, more and more companies laying off individuals.
That continues until we hit a bottom, which we may or may not have seen yet, given the massive amounts of evictions coming as of today.
I'm not a fan of Uber. I'm not interested in promoting that, honestly. I would like to see more walkable neighborhoods and better public transit and so forth. There are a lot of things I don't like about these trends towards paying a pittance to people who already drive to play the underpaid taxi driver role or the underpaid food delivery guy (Uber Eats, etc).
Me being for creating work that is safe is not the same as me being for having more Uber drivers and I find it aggravating that this is a routine thing people do, though I do understand why people make that inference. It's really not something I'm trying to promote and I don't know how to shed that interpretation elegantly. I feel like getting into my (negative) opinions of car culture and gig work layered on top of car culture is probably not going to go over well with most people.
I've lived without a car for a lot of years and people seem to feel okay with me being me in that regard if they can chalk it up to "She's just poverty-stricken and can't afford a car" or "She's just seriously medically handicapped and can no longer drive and is muddling through as best she can" and they get real, real uncomfortable if I start talking about not driving as a choice because I'm an environmental studies major and I wanted to be an urban planner and things like that.
I don't think America currently works all that well and I've spent a lot of years studying things like housing policy and I think I have some good ideas, but I'm a woman and poor and blah blah blah. There is always some excuse why I can't be taken seriously and those excuses were always there. I wasn't taken seriously in my youth either. It's not actually "because I was homeless for years."
We did this once before. We currently have unemployment levels similar to The Great Depression and that was resolved with going to war and they were surprised that they were able to come up with the resources to create both more "butter" and more "guns." In other words, more civilian production and more military production.
That was true because so many people were not working.
We have to get people working and being productive. That's the real issue here. And how we do that and make it safe is a question we need to address.
I don't think germ control is going to stop being an issue. I think the pandemic is rooted in the fact that we have nearly 8 billion people on the planet.
We didn't need this level of germ control historically because most people lived in little villages and the like. So we just didn't interact with that many people.
I think the pandemic is the universe trying to give the human race a hint that "You can't keep interacting with this many people cavalierly like germs don't matter. You can't run around shaking hands with a zillion people and expect that to not cause problems."
I think it is a huge mistake to act like Covid-19 is some anomaly and we need to just wait for it to pass.
I think we need to start making cultural changes and the front line of defense will be how we work.
Demand is down in part because people aren't working. It's a chicken and egg thing and we need to work on getting people working somehow.
And I keep imagining I will blog about it instead of leaving forum comments and stop aggravating people who don't want to hear it, but I'm failing to do that. Conversation provides a feedback loop that's hard to create when you blog, which is mostly me howling into the void and no own replies.
I don't know how to get taken seriously, but I'm clear on a few things. I'm just not clear how to communicate about those things in an effective manner that will get traction and it's making me crazy because the world clearly needs solutions and I don't quite understand why it is actively turning down solutions from someone who has spent nearly twenty years figuring out how to live with a high degree of germ control and many people know that.
Lots of restaurants started no contact delivery and low contact pickup. Do most people avoiding restaurants care if a pizza portal would be a little safer? Or are they trying to save money and lose the weight they've put on?
So for the people who can't afford to pay rent, well, a lot of them will end up on the street. No job, no home, no health insurance.
Keep in mind that in this economy the supply of money is not flowing anymore to the middle class, many of who were already living paycheck to paycheck. It's all being hoarded by those who have it seeking wealth preservation above all else first.
States cannot create new money and they cannot declare bankruptcy. Most states also have balanced budget requirements [3].
If you want government support, the federal government is the only entity uniformly capable of creating money and running deficits.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/Portals/1/Documents/fiscal/Rev-Projecti...
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/2020-state-rainy-day-funds/
[3] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-state...
Most humans agree that progressive taxation is moral and just, but today "raising taxes on the wealthy" merely means "raising taxes on the wealthy to match the average person".
I just like fairness. I think they should raise taxes to pay for the COVID bailouts. But on EVERYONE. Not just on someone else. On me and on you. Because I'm not a spiteful jealous person.
https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
Mass homelessness would be hellish for everyone. While we are all naturally focused on our individual situations it's good to not lose sight of the big picture.
I’m budgeting for up to a 10% aggregate tax increase now, but I have no idea if that’s too high or low.
Worse is the stuffing of the bills with defense appropriations and more items not related to COVID19. Worse is the attempt to feed the state governments between five hundred to a trillion dollars to shore up budgets of states that are not even trying to clip their expenditures, most of this is routed towards shoring up their pension systems and again, not COVID19 related.
The real pandemic is the debt bomb that Congress is foisting on the American public, remember, no serious crisis can be allowed to go to waste. It is time for the money to flow to friends and family.
This is obviously flawed, and the initial idea was income replacement so your income remained the same, but the state of the IT infrastructure in unemployment offices across the US is so dismal there was no way they could cope with that requirement.
Hyperbolic.
This is so frustrating to me. States pretend like their budgets are sacrosanct and refuse to take any action to prepare themselves. They’ll milk every last drop from their constituents before they start cutting fat.
Also any service that is temporarily furloughed because of shelter-at-home should have their employees furloughed as well. In other words they should experience the pain the same way as the rest of us.
* https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/10/26/ill...
Very many states going into this had substantial rainy day funds, and many states have done what they can't to cut expense:service ratios while boosting services (sometimes under preprogrammed, federally-governed formulas, as for many state-federal confunded entitlements) such as employee pay cuts (like the furloughs in California). The idea that states have done nothing to prepare or that states aren't taking steps on their own is preposterous. States are structurally more limited than the feds in how they can financially respond to an urgent crises, and for that reason have always relied on the feds being part of that response, but they are not generally failing to do their part as far as financial steps; some are falling down on the public health parts, but mostly that's a result of pressure directed from the federal executive branch, not independent state intransigence or nonfeasance.
States shouldn't be trying to clip overall service expenditures during a massive economic and public health emergency that creates novel challenges for education delivery (health, economic safety net, and education cover much of the big ticket state spending items, and this situation creates additional demands on all of them.)
And, unlike the feds, states can't as a practical (and usually constitutional) matter meet temporary emergency need with deficit spending for operations, because most have Constitutional balanced operating budget requirements but, more importantly (because it's a constraint that applies whatever the state chooses), they have a much higher cost of borrowing because they aren’t currency issuers whose debt is in their own currency.
For that reason, it's normal for the federal government to backstop the states on major emergencies specifically so they aren't forced to make temporary economic emergencies worse by taking more money out through spending cuts or saddle taxpayers with greater debts than if the feds were paying by borrowing at the state level.
That's the problem here. The states are using the emergency to bail out their pension and other over spending that was a problem even without the pandemic. For years now, they've been warned that the promises they made could not be kept. The math doesn't lie.
They didn't care. They figured they'd worry about it when the time came, always passing the buck to the next politicians. Well, the pandemic and lack of tax revenue has now brought that point forward.
The rest of us - especially those of us in red states who've been listening to raging blue states scream at us for being 'subsidized by them' for the last decade - are paying attention to this backhanded bailout for fiscal problems not directly related to covid.
Like, even if they care not a whit about the people involved (they don't), it is republicans' own self interest that they do not go into the 2020 elections having crashed the economy at an absolutely unprecedented rate. They should be doing whatever it takes to avert it.
Numbers like "33% annualized decline in the economy" should be striking fear into everyone's heart. We are speedrunning the great depression, the great depression took five years to hit bottom, we are going to do it in a year or so unless something drastic is done.
And how many Americans has that pandemic killed over the last few months?
The real pandemic is people dying and being disabled, not debt. Saying it's debt is callous and cruel as people are dying and becoming disabled all around us. How is it possible to have no empathy at all like this?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_the_COVID-1...
Your question, though, is presumably around whether we'd expect problems with systemically important banks. Highly unlikely, for two reasons:
First, regulatory changes to their capital structures largely prevent them from holding things like CMBS on their balance sheet unless they reserve significant amounts of capital against it. This is what facilitate the rise of private equity landlordship: banks exited the business.
Second (and this has, largely, already happened) the Fed and other central banks learned their lessons well, and were swift and comprehensive about backstopping the financial markets.
[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/file...
[2] https://www.fhfa.gov/AboutUs/Reports/ReportDocuments/HPI-mon...
At the same time, it could also be accurate to assert that without some organization propping up the economy, short term losses, and possibly long term harm, would greatly exceed whatever the delta ends up being on the Fed's purchases/sales.
What's happening instead is that money is funneled almost directly from Federal Reserve accounts into equities markets, making only a brief appearance in the hands of consumers. There, it mostly seems to prevent deflation -- which keeps people buying stuff and avoids massive unemployment (and causing even more deflation).
At some point the market will correct, and the outflow will go... somewhere. A lot of that money will simply vanish, leaving us with massive debts owed by the government to the banks and large bond buyers. That will be a whole different kind of crash.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...
* Big Tech use skyrockets taking the market higher.
* Fed pumping trillions inflates asset prices.
Yes!
A dollar is a good just like any other. If there is more of it, it is worth less. If you print more money, the dollars that people hold and have are worth less.
That said, the US has gotten away with printing dollars for a very long time with very little inflation in basic consumer goods. It seems to mostly end up in real estate, stocks, etc. where most are happy to see prices shoot up. Except, of course, those who are just getting started and can't afford to get in on the inflated prices.
We need to go after these people hard because they are collapsing our civilization. There need to be punitive actions that correct the market and drive it back to something that actually produces people living in homes for a low price and development moving in a resilient, frankly boring manner. This in turn produces a populace with more free time, a requirement for training & education, something that will have to be done with increasing frequency as time goes on. This drives wages up naturally, as more people can choose to work less or not work. This shrinks sustenance & panic borrowing, which is another reason FIRE likes keeping us on their hook. This stops much property crime, which shrinks the need for police forces, jails, & the circus of pornographically perverse incentives that surround our criminal justice system.
In no uncertain terms let me say this: if we tanked the price of housing, tanked the rental market, and got humans into houses instead of some wealth-dreaming deluded landlord or scummy bank that wants to reap what they never sow, we could easily transition into the future we desire. The loss people fear with this action isn't actually a fear of the loss of wealth, it is the fear of losing the ease-of-mind and projected future peace associated with ownership of the asset. We would do well to begin considering how to provide that for one another without harming one another.
Why not just eliminate private property all together? Everyone should just rent stuff from the government.
That is something that could be done, to a degree.
You can increase transfer taxes and offer a partial refund over the course of some number of years, provided that the home has the homeowner exemption in place.
Increase the property tax rate while also increasing the homeowner exemption so that the total tax paid is the same as it was before.
Etc.
If tomorrow a law came about that said 'you can own no more than one home, full stop', watch how many renters buy their first home on firesale.
If you limited home purchases to say, one per year or two, it would open back up the lower cost market. Not every house needs to be flipped.
If inflation comes and it becomes necessary to raise interest rates, that would cause a correction.
Since there is so much cash floating around and no good places to put it, when people have to exit the market new money floods in, keeping asset prices up. In January PE firms had 1.5T cash ready to invest. I'm sure that will get deployed as bankruptcies start to happen.
2019 - 15.4 trillion.
2020 - 18.3 trillion and growing...
(M2 dollar volume)
As they say - the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent...
I thought the COVID crisis would blow this all up, but it hasn't. In fact rural land values keep climbing because of wealthy Torontonians now seeking to have cottages and the like outside of the city.
I don't even know what to say about it at this point. Admittedly the economic situation isn't as dire here because the gov't has spent freely to help keep people afloat, but it just seems so irrational to me that housing prices continue to go up at almost 10% a year when the economic fundamentals are so messed up.
You can see the Canada housing bubble represented in that Canadian households are among the most indebted on the planet (it's heavy with mortgage debt).
Here's a chart showing the prominent split with the US, where they go different directions after 2007-2008 (Canada's bubble and debt accumulation kept going and the US began deleveraging and improving its household fiscal condition and debt to equity ratio in housing):
Median wealth per household is about 200k vs 77k in the USA.
Edit: used per-household stats instead
If you get taxed harder in Canada but then don't have to pay for healthcare or education privately than in the US, then it makes no sense to just say 'look disposable income in Canada is lower, thus debt:disposable income is higher, thus Canada is worse off'. You'd first have to correct for the fact disposable income is lower because taxes are higher, because healthcare and education are publicly financed and therefore individuals require less disposable income and could be just as well off.
Second, just look at mortgage delinquency rates between the US and Canada for an impression on affordability.[0]
Third, debt doesn't matter much, not all debt is made equal. A 15% creditcard loan for $10k is much worse than a $20k 3% loan, in terms of bankruptcy risk, even if the debt to income ratio is worse on the latter loan. You can't just look at debt to income, and again, especially not disposable income between countries which very different systems without correcting for it.
Absolute debt doesn't say much, debt servicing does, and in particular servicing of interest rates. That's actually at historic lows for Canada [1], which is totally different from the US[2]. Canada's debt servicing ratios are much lower than in the US. And that's why, in part, the delinquency rates are much, much lower, and why it's not quite so simple to conclude that Canada is in a RE bubble compared to the US.
[0] https://i.insider.com/596f5f88a47cb502028b4f17?width=750&for... [1] https://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/can_mort_... [2] https://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/us_mort_d...
Canada is a politically stable economically stable and fairly wealthy place (in the major cities) with fairly high immigration rates, and the immigration is merit based and fairly prosperous. So growth has been steady.
That growth kinda snuck up on us, though, even for those of us living here it seems crazy that these cities are "worth" so much now.
A salary will be like 25% less but cars are 25% more expensive? Yet I see some really fly automobiles flying around the TO.
Base salaries for our industry look like they've been improving lately in the GTA. But not so much for other industries.
Except the big one of health care. Daycare, tuition, infrastructure, etc. are also mostly covered depending on where you are. So a lot more is paid for by taxes.
> job offers I turned down from Toronto based tech companies.
Tech salaries are much lower here to be sure, but we just have satellite offices of large tech firms beyond Shopify.
The brain drain south is a well known issue up here. If it were not for the healthcare nonsense in the USA, I probably would have gone too.
1. Canada's immigration system is merit-based. Firms in Canada import skilled immigrants to fill tech vacancies in a way that US-based companies cannot. In Canada, it can take as little as a few weeks to get a temporary work permit for a foreign tech worker. Once they are in the country, they can apply for permanent residency through a provincial program and have PR status (this is like a green card) within a year.
2. Canadian tech firms are generally smaller. It is well known that smaller firms pay less across the board, in all industries, let alone tech.
The current system works perfectly for what it was designed to do. The cycle repeats endlessly funneling money from the lower class upwards.
The government has spent $10,000 per US resident propping up banks, hedge funds, dog-shit junk-grade corporate debt, etc.
Do you think that money was well spent propping up braindead investment funds, or would you have used it better?
We are at ridiculously high unemployment numbers, so whether people are "incentivized" to work or not doesn't mean much.
Not sure it's the right term to use for people, since as you say, the jobs aren't there. But for state governments, for sure.
This causes the states' perverse incentives that you mentioned. Many people believe a big push to reopen has been motivated by states trying to get people off unemployment as they know some workers would rather stay safe at home and lose unemployment benefits than return to work in an unsafe environment.
>Certainly there will be some people who do it, but you would basically have to commit fraud to do it.
Also the extra unemployment benefits expired so anyone still doing this is not making more than they would at their job. Their only incentive to continue this fraud is for their own personal safety. You can't call a preference for one's own personal safety "perverse".
Maybe then it says more about our current economic system as a whole.
But my point was it seems like if $600 / week is enough for folks to choose not to work, that says more about the work not being meaningful or the employer being unable to (or choosing not to) pay the worker well.
If $600/wk is enough not to work, then it can also speak to the quality of the worker and their lack of skills. Spending time complaining about how hard life is, rather than doing something about it. Not everyone is like that, and not no-one is like that either.
Severance is counted against eligibility for unemployment in most states.
Source; had a friend not understand this, to wonder where their unemployment was, to get their first check after their severance ran out.
two of your three examples are plague-pit jobs that will involve the employee interfacing with the public and getting sick, probably bankrupting themselves with medical bills. that's the real problem.
it's a free market, and if you can't retain employees that's because you're not offering enough. Offer someone $1m a year to work in your casino, they'll take it (even during a pandemic) and you know it. Now we're just negotiating over the price.
Start offering $60k, maybe $70k, and full health coverage to balance out, you know, risking your life and long term financial health so Karen can get her gyro, and people will take it.
The real underlying problem is that a lot of these businesses are essentially bankrupt already, they are the walking dead, their business model will no longer work due to the pandemic (they relied on not paying for their employees' health care and that's no longer a viable scheme with the pandemic on) and they're demanding what amount to subsidies (artificial reductions on the cost of labor, for which the clearing price has risen due to increased personal risk) in order to stay afloat.
taking away unemployment benefits isn't going to bring customers back to your subway, it's over for a significant number of businesses and the owners are pleading to delay the inevitable. This is the economic impact that people wanted to pretend didn't exist, there is no reason the stock market should be bouncing against an all-time high when our economy dived 33% annualized rate this quarter and the pandemic is spreading faster than ever.
You're looking at a crashing economy and suggesting that the real problem is the only brace still propping it up, and suggesting that we knock it out.
Many of these businesses are going to die regardless, because of the failed pandemic response, the failure to enact a sufficient degree of stimulus, and because these businesses are no longer viable with an ongoing pandemic.
And yes, I said plague pit. How in the world do you think it's reasonable for an employee that is not provided with any health insurance (or a bronze plan or whatever) to risk an infection that can stick you with a $1.1m bill, for $7.50 an hour? Employees are, shall we say, not going to respond to that economic incentive, that's not a reasonable trade from any perspective.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/breaking-down-this-miracle...
Instead, they will stay at home, and 33% of renters are going to miss their payment this month, just as the article says. As they said in 2008: if you don't pay your mortgage this month, you have a problem. If 33% of people don't pay their mortgage this month... the bank has a problem.
The reality is that businesses that require interfacing with the public are going to see a downturn in customers no matter what, and are going to have to start paying for their employees' health care, no matter what. You can't expect people to take on a near-certainty of an extraordinarily expensive hospital stay for $7.50 per hour. People won't do that, and customers aren't coming into the business at the same rate they used to anyway. Those businesses are walking dead and forcing employees to accept sub-market wages to get them back to work won't help that.
The drive to work can get you a $500k doctor bill, and at similar risks for Covid $500k doctor bill. Both of which these demographics will not pay at all. They will either just leave it in collections or use bankruptcy to eliminate it.
It's how business owners paying minimum wage want the market to work, but it's not how it does. Shit, a lot of businesses aren't even trying to mitigate the risks, not providing PPE, etc - they just expect minimum-wage workers to absorb all that risk and cost if they don't want to die.
2. It's not just you, you could infect your friends and family and children.
3. If someone actually compared the actual odds (i.e. real numbers) of getting in a card accident with getting Covid-19 working in one of these public-facing jobs we are discussing, under current conditions, then we'd be able to tell if the comparison you're proposing is reasonable or not.
Everyone is talking about the employees not wanting to go back to work, but as far as I can tell, I don't think the customers want to go to the businesses either.
I still personally think the crux is lack of demand. I don't think the customers exist anymore that would be willing to pay enough to account for the extra cost of the business given Covid. And one of those cost include safety precautions to their employees.
As an example, Amazon was able to hire 175000 additional workers through the pandemic, even though they were getting unemployment checks.
So I think it's naive to think that removing unemployment is what will save those business. But I'm not a zealot on this, that's just my current rationale. I'm welcoming counter points.
I recall (long time ago) that Germany's unemployment included a list that employers could use to find workers. If an unemployed person was offered a job, they were cut from unemployment. Our current system has people claiming unemployment, getting more money that working. This created a situation that employer could complain to the government, but then the employee feels "cheated" and brings those negative feelings back to work... not exactly a good situation.
The current system has all sorts of moral hazard and unintended consequences. I could provide a policy recommendation, but that's really out of scope for a small discussion forum.
I do appreciate your discussion though!
The US has a very good level of testing/mask usage. And, to be blunt, just wear a mask and wash your hands...you will be okay. I understand why some groups of people are very worried: if you are obese, if you are over 60, if you work in a hospital/care home...but if you work in an office, it isn't a "Hunger Games" situation.
I don't think furlough/unemployment schemes necessarily created that incentive though. People in some places are clearly being very cautious (I am in the UK, people aren't wearing masks and not being cautious at all...I have seen larger crowds at pubs than ever...no masks) anyway.
So I think the solution to the unemployment problem is a change in message from govt. If you take precautions, you will be okay (again, where I am the message was very urgent and serious...this worked at first but some people are ignoring totally and others are staying at home terrified of their own shadow...so who knows? But I think it would have success generally).
If this is true, why is the outbreak here so much worse than basically any of our peer countries?
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/08/05/8993658...
And looking in the last 3 days is misleading since we know the pandemic hits in waves, at different times, across different countries.
The problem is we aren't at the end yet. Any time frame you use is therefore going to give you an incomplete picture. I used the last three days because it shows that the US is clearly in a worse current position. That means we will continue creeping up that initial per capita list you linked. Maybe the UK, Spain, France, or Italy experience a second wave at some point down the line, but at least they have gotten past the first wave that the US still hasn't been able to stop.
Instead of saying "better" I should have said "has fewer per capita deaths so far".
But as you said in your other reply, we understand Covid to be a regional disease that comes in waves, washing over a region and then subsiding. For smaller, denser countries in Europe, it is easier for this disease to reach all regions. America is vast with a much lower population density, and the virus is taking its time finding its way around.
However, if you break the US down into regions you can see how bad it is. NY state has a comparable population density to Italy (162 vs 200 for Italy), and both were hard hit at the beginning of this thing. New York state suffered 1,687 deaths per million, while Italy only suffered 582 deaths per million so far. This I think provides a more nuanced picture rather than just looking at deaths per million by country. Population density is really a factor here.
That assumes that the masks are as effective as claimed, that mass enforcement is even feasible, and that the Federal govt. has the right to create such a mandate. I don't believe we have enough data to know the efficacy of masks, especially handmade masks out in the field. Mass enforcement of mask wearing, even if it was somehow cost affordable to task law enforcement with, would likely be met with heavy protest or open revolt in the United States by various civil rights groups.
There's nothing wrong with being concerned about safety, especially these days. However, it's not so simple as 'pass a mask law', and if you really think about it ... there's a silver lining there. Do you want to be ruled by a government who can tell you what to wear, when to wear it, how to wear it — even if you dissent? Once there is a precedent for a national mask law, the Federal government can use that to push for further loss of freedoms for individuals and states. I'm not saying the mask law concept is intentionally being pushed to erode freedoms, rather, that it has the potential to do so.
Businesses can already refuse service for any reason not protected by Federal/State law. That's plenty of grounds to kick out a non mask wearer. I don't see the need for additional laws, enforcement, or government spending. Let businesses and employees decide the level of risk they are willing to take.
And you want a national mandate to wear masks but you said that people wearing them got infected. Interesting take.
[1] https://www.bryanhealth.com/app/files/public/4953/wear-a-mas...
you'd need to take an unnecessary risk like eating lunch in a group to create a significant exposure in that environment.
I'm... not sure... whether the science on this holds up, but it struck me as a good compromise. People expressed concern that wearing a mask for nine hours straight, without any breaks, would become very uncomfortable.
Politicians like Ocasio-Cortez actively told people they shouldn't go back to work even as places open back up. This is problematic because if enough people believe that, there is a risk of shortages for things like food. We over produce quite a bit in America, farms are heavily subsidized, and it's mostly school/restaurant food chain products that are being dumped right now (and many Americans are realizing for the first time we get totally different qualities of products than restaurants do), so it's not affecting us too badly yet.
Hopefully it won't, but there needs to be a balance between any proposal for UBI or continued unemployment and restarting production systems that produce domestic goods we need to survive.
This is interesting, can you clarify what you mean?
This is one of the tricky things about economic policy. If you are proposing UBI, you are likely to be the worst person possible to implement it. All the proponents see are upsides without the deep understanding of the downsides.
A country which manages this well is Denmark. They have high levels of union membership, they have a true contributory unemployment insurance scheme that functions like UBI but they are also very savvy about capitalism/markets, and have one of the most flexible labour markets in the world (one of the few places on par with the US, maybe even ahead of). They understand that capitalism is the way you pay for all this stuff, it is the solution, not the problem. Very few political systems can make this leap.
The same applies to the discussion around restarting. Lots of countries went hard on the lockdown rhetoric...and now, it is pretty hard to roll back.
It is very concerning though. I don't think this is going to be some huge decade long disaster, things will get better. But there is a real possibility that a lot of supply gets destroyed in the meantime as the middle-class cocoons themselves at home out of fear.
If the benefits were instead given to everyone, then you wouldn't lose money by getting a job.
The argument against generous "unemployment insurance" vs. "UBI" is valid enough. But it's based on an assumption of near-full employment that doesn't hold right now.
Basically: this is not the time to have that argument.
Broadly: I think this is mostly spin, and would want to see a real study instead of anecdotes from friends.
Do agree on unemployment though. The overhead of administering the program is nonsensical. Florida purposefully designed its systems to deny as many claims as possible. The idea of designing government systems as terribly as possible so that people hate the government is holding us back in times of crisis.
UBI payments simplify the whole thing.
Trickle up economics!
I'm starting to think that the outcome of our political systems in the West produces suboptimal compromises engineered by politicians who are quite frankly ignorant, incompetent, corrupt, and really just not good specimens of the species. It's like the system is designed to be mediocre.
What's the alternative though?
Because the edge cases often take more than ten minutes to reveal themselves?
See: "Tough on crime/drugs" policies, lead in gasoline and paint, etc.
The point of "hidden complexity" is that it's hidden. Talking to an expert in public policy in the specific area in question might well reveal the "glaring flaw" is actually a known thing, with a good but counter-intuitive reason behind it.
I've seen precisely that in software; big precautionary comments in code that say "this seems weird, but here's why it exists; you can try and fix it, but you'll just increment the 'leave this code alone' counter again".
Simply put, you can make better decisions because you don't have to negotiate.
However, it also appears to me to be objectively better for society at large, in as much as I'm able to be objective.
Yes.
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/the-worst-form...
I certainly have. It usually leads to 3-4 wasted years of dev time on the brand new architecture that will never match all the features of the old stack, and during that time the old stack has fewer and fewer resources and the tech debt piles up.
It is absurdly easy to come up with a better plan in 10 minutes if you have absolutely no idea how it really works or how complicated it really is.
However, I don't accept this answer. I think most of the time the government's plan is so bad, so glaringly flawed, that even from my position of ignorance, I'm confident I can beat it without hardly trying.
the problem is that one of the political parties has it as an ideological point that government doesn't and can't work, and sets out to sabotage everything to prove that they're right. Like how florida deliberately makes it impossible to get your unemployment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast
There is, unfortunately, not a good fix for this, as similar parties exist worldwide. But banning Murdoch media and de-consolidating media control in general (returning local stations to local management, etc) would be a good start.
Cause right now this is your local news station: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI
A large part of the problem of "why doesn't government produce good outcomes" is exactly this - people who have a vested personal interest in producing bad outcomes, because that's what they run on.
How do you fix it? Not easy obviously, but certain propaganda networks are a large chunk of the problem. Murdoch's networks specifically, and Sinclair's network controlling local broadcasting.
Because your plan doesn't please campaign funds, interest groups, and voters in a bicameral legislature and a long electoral college selected President .... and skate past 200 years of federal and state laws.
There's a reason why Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin were able to achieve things quickly.
Authoritarianism is fast and exceptional, because only everyone that matters gets a voice.
Problem is that fast ‘large decisions’ can be catastrophic, and those without a voice eventually rise up...
I'm an advocate for a UBI, and I'd use it to shift from working 5 days/week to 4 or 3 days/week. A move that many argue wouldn't effect the economy's output much at all, considering other countries economies do fine with less average working hours.
Additionally, a UBI would let more people participate in the economy and increase purchasing power of the less wealthy, which would help the economy.
So now I usually just work to pay bills and spending money, stashing away for a rainy day, etc. Most of it goes to taxes.
Given UBI, I probably wouldn't even need to bother.
(to paraphrase)
Decide minimum wage, then give UBI to adults based on that.
If $15 per hr is minimum wage, UBI should be $2600 per month.
Once someone is getting this UBI, it should be legal to have jobs that pay $1 per hr or $0.5 per hr.
Right now there is an incredible power imbalance between employers and employees, where for the employer it's an inconvenience if they lose the employee, while for the employee it's loss of access to food, shelter and medicine if they lose their employer.
This means that the employer can squeeze the employee, allowing them to pile on with abusive working conditions, bad pay, and poor compensation. Lots of workplaces outright steal out of the paychecks for the employees in plain daylight and get away with it because the employee knows that if they raise a fuss they might get fired.
Nobody would work for 1 dollar an hour, as you say. So companies will have to offer more to attract workers. And the workers have the option of saying "no" if what they offer just isn't good enough. So they would be two equal parties, bargaining over what the labor is worth, without neither having a gun pushed against their head if they say "no".
Weirdly, a lot of people seem to think things are as they should be. People should starve and be homeless if they aren't willing to work under unsafe condition, or being blackmailed into working for bottom wages just to have food to eat tomorrow. I'm not a fan of that sort of Social Darwinism though.
Yes, if it prepared you for better jobs. Low wage dead-end jobs might not exist (then again, they might, different people have different utility functions), but low-wage on-ramp jobs that cannot exist now certainly would.
Yes, people are generally good and want to do meaningful things and contribute to society. But we're also lazy, selfish, and good at convincing ourselves to make short-term choices with poor long-term consequences.
I think with UBI, there would be a whole lot of couch potatoes. I don't think that's necessarily morally a bad thing, but if the ratio of couch potatoes to people producing economic activity that pays into the UBI fund is bad enough, it can make UBI simply economically unsustainable whether you think it's a moral good or not.
So there is a balance between:
A. Keeping UBI low enough to incentivize people to produce labor such that UBI is financial self-sustaining.
B. Keeping UBI high enough that people who do not work are not destitute.
I think fans of UBI have a tacit assumption that A is well above B, but I am not so certain.
Hell, in a world of UBI, I'd anticipate volunteer organizations to flourish.
Opponents of UBI often ignore the word BASIC.
Next would be, are they up for removal of all subsidies / free programs (e.g., SNAP / food stamps)?
How can health care costs be addressed with fixed UBI?
I can see UBI succeeding or at least not failing in countries like Canada since healthcare costs are zero for individuals, no matter how poor or moneyless they are.
Without having a similar Healthcare system, how can UBI be even implemented?
Ps: I’m neither strongly for/against UBI yet, but curious to see how it can solve the problem. I just have a lot of unanswered questions when asking them to UBI supporters.
Change always seems fast and overwhelming until it’s done, then we realize that support for it had been growing bit by bit, and all that was left was that final leap.
Even if the UBI is impossible to attain tomorrow, we should still lobby for it so it will be attainable someday.
Did the U.S. not send $1200 to every citizen (under a means test) in May?
And several European nations.
That sounds like a great idea until UBI is treated like a driver's license...something that can be taken away...if you, for example, are seen at a "riot", or "interfere" with law enforcement, or stay out past 10pm.
It won't start with protestors though, but with people who owe child support, or who are convicted of drunk driving or drug offenses.
A big argument _against_ UBI is that "people wont work, and won't do productive things". This unemployment is actually worse than that; the fact that it "all goes away" when you exceed your state weekly income cap means that people can't do safe, productive "work", even if they want to. If your passion is selling art, and you sell a painting for $200, you most likely just excluded yourself from ~800$ in unemployment that week.
This isn't even touching on the difference in social-economic situation impacting ones ability to even apply/qualify for unemployment benefits in the first place, and fact that many state unemployment systems are designed to prevent people from actually being able to collect.
The way that the $600/week is talked about it completely ignores everyone (a substantial amount) of people who fell through the cracks. The unemployment system is not designed for distributing catastrophe-relief, and it's a disservice to literally everyone involve by pretending it is.
I see. On that I agree with you. Replacing the $600/week with something better - yes!
One-third had expected to miss, but managed to scrape together the payment?
Or
One-third are expected to miss?
Brevity is valuable but not at the cost of clarity.
In either case it doesn't make much difference. It was a survey done in July for August rent. One-third of renters DID EXPECT to miss August rent; and now, August rent being past due, we EXPECT that one-third of August rent was missed (lacking actual data around August rent payments made).
You tried to add in a bit of non sequitur / additional unsubstantiated info in your interpretation which was about the "scraping together" - there's nothing about that in the data
That kind of thing's usually added by people as just a bit of color for storytelling purposes.
Does the graph presented of those most likely to have issues with rent match with those states that locked down the hardest?
> paying people extra unemployment money to not working ?
I'm confused - are you implying that by giving some people money (for some more than they would earn while employed), that prevented them paying rent? If any, it would seem like a failure in the dispersal of said money.