Millions of U.S. Jobs to Be Lost for Years, IRS Projections Show | Hacker News Reader

Millions of U.S. Jobs to Be Lost for Years, IRS Projections Show

bloomberg.com

38 pointsspy88810 comments

What's going to happen when these 37.2 million jobs are lost? Are these people just going to starve on the streets? Do they have financial resources that they didn't know they had? I find myself frustrated whenever reading about the job losses because things are always phrased in the abstract, like "The agency expects that $METRIC will be down 40% in the next decade." I don't know what that means for the people who are actually going through this catastrophe.

I also seriously question these sorts of projections, especially out as far as a decade. There's so many variables and unknowns, and I'm not certain how the IRS arrives at this conclusion, and it's not clear what assumptions they're making in their projections.

What I really need is a recent comprehensive source on how COVID is affecting the economy. Right now all the information is coming in piece-meal and I have no idea what to make of it all.

We’ll witness the birth of what I call the “Shadow Economy” evolve from the reputation economy. Since companies can’t exist, they won’t. Instead workers will find work where they don’t pay income or sales taxes which could be a global federated crypto network. If you remove taxes from the equation and replace them with what might be next generation smart contracts that work like cash (offline) then really government will be the one out of a job. Credit card processors and banks are already anticipating this future with their recent crypto card standard. In the BLM riots my chase bank actually was burned to the ground. There definitely is a vacuum to be filled and I think most out of work just need a platform that works without trust.

Good luck convincing anybody that moving crypto through their bank is going to enable them to avoid taxes.

Their has always been a shadow economy, and it runs on cash.

I wasn’t implying anything nefarious by the term “shadow”, only that it stands in the shadow of the reputation economy. I also meant that two outcomes might exist: 1. Something like ether or 2. The banking system would corner the market.

This has already happened before. The great depression will simply repeat itself. However, there is a big if. Will the worst case scenario actually happen? It is entirely possible that more people switch to remote work over the long term.

https://outline.com/SsXtZq

They really painted themselves into a corner with the low interest rates, though I was never convinced that quarter basis point adjustments really made people magically withdraw money and go on a spending spree anyway. It always seemed more like a “we did something” placebo. Could just as easily be a ceremony where once a month the president goes to the treasury and pushes a big “Fix economy” button or maybe he’ll push the “Ruin economy” button, cue speculation and suspense.

Interest rates can't fix a broken economy. Interest rates are like annoying parents nagging you to get a job, they accelerate an existing trend. If there are enough jobs then you will simply get a job earlier than you planned but you were going to get that job eventually. If there are no jobs then the only thing that changes is that your life is getting worse (=stagflation), not better, because your parents start hating you more and more.

Of course the government can always create jobs out of thin air through stimulation or a jobs program, but that's not the same thing as playing around with interest rates.

37.2 million less jobs seems crazy. What does that mean? That's not in line with BLS data which has much smaller peak job loss and quick recovery

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000

Maybe employees with multiple employers?

The crazy thing is that more jobs have come back than were created during the previous administration's two terms.

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