We haven't even seen the extent of the depression yet. Combined with congressional inaction on social spending a lot of people are going to be in very deep finanical issues. This is a systemic problem that we needed fixed 3 months ago.
Most of the companies receiving relief were badly managed before the pandemic, and they should be allowed to fail. But it's very hard to structure relief in a fair and effective way.
I think we can handle setting up a payment system...
Like what kind of weak ass excuse is that? You can't figure out how to pay everyone?
Please. Give me a break.
Ubi is the effective and fair way to stimulate the economy btw.
All this stimulus aimed at businesses is absolutely moronic.
If people know they have secure pay coming in they will spend the money. Its the uncertainty that causes people to hard cash.
Businesses don't need the cash, if they can't stay afloat during this they shouldn't be allowed to make it through.
I do believe they deserve some help,aybe tax breaks, maybe short term allowance to make people redundant / reduce so they can equalise the books but there is no fair way to give them money and not the people.
I dont think temporary relief will make or break a business model effected by the pandemic. On some of those edge cases we will need to decide whether the government will get their money back or accept losses.
How many people are/were barely attached to the banking system? Especially if you’re working, well, a bit under the table, in day labor situations like construction or office cleaning.
I got my stimulus check. Basically immediately. Because I have a standard 9–5 salaried job with direct deposit, so the government knew exactly where to send the money. But that seems to obviously not have the force multiplier effect of sending it to someone who just got fired from a movie theater.
“salaried job with direct deposit”
No it's not. Seemed to work fine in July didn't it? It's obviously a political problem. Why can't we just use the same mechanism again?
edit: Maybe you're talking about the business/paycheck replacement relief and not the individual checks like the parent was?
... and then in 2021 we can all scratch our heads and wonder why income inequality is worse than ever, and despite all this spending, we didn't even make an appreciable dent in the impact of Covid-19 on public health.
Corporate lobbyists know the government is a cash cow, and they take advantage of this. They will always get relief if they ask for it.
Direct payments are the opposite of this.
If you wanted to stop that, you'd have to actually pay for your spending, perhaps by implement some sort of wealth tax or dramatically increasing income taxes. Of course, nobody wants to increase taxes, so we just keep printing money to try and fix every problem.
And I think you're confusing monetary stimulus with fiscal stimulus.
> It doesn't matter how the money is distributed, it tends to inflate asset prices
For the US, that's not true. The US Dollar is the world's reserve currency, and the Fed isn't worried about inflation, but a lack of money supply. The pandemic has led to a huge demand for safe assets, including Treasury bonds, which has led to incredibly low interest rates on Treasury bonds, and a stronger dollar. See, for example, this article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/05/what-2-tr....
Direct payments and rent forgiveness are not "printing money", they are limited, specific relief packages targeted at people in need. These are people who are about to be evicted, homeless, in medical debt, etc. These people need help, or the consequences will wreak havoc on a colossal scale.
Once we had things under control, we could loosen up quarantine, then when it got shitty again, tighten it up again and pay people to stay home. It would have goddamn paid for itself. If people could quarantine and know their livelihoods were secure, they wouldn't be so upset about it.
edit: this is a rehearsal for when the next coronavirus comes around that has an infection rate like covid-19 but a death rate like MURS. It's going to whip through the world like the plague.
[1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/159-million-economic-impact-pay...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/business/corona...
Great, but the bill cost $2T. Same with the recent one that’s been put on ice. Because there’s no such thing as a bill that only contains direct cash payments to citizens, they’re loaded up with pork and stuff that doesn’t even having anything to do with the pandemic.
For example: suppose hospitality workers are paid to stay at home. How is that paid for? Well actually it's entiely paid for by people having fewer of the hospitality experiences that they are used to. It is obvious when you take money out of the equation that hospitality workers staying at home will not cause there to be any less of essentials such as food and shelter to go around.
There are other sectors like manufacturing where there is a real cost to be paid. But that could be as small as delaying the purchase of the manufactured goods by period of lockdown. No so bad.
Whem you look at it like this way, QE seems entirely justified. All it really does is spread the effects accross the economy to people who can bear them, and avoids financially ruining people which will be a primaey cause of long term economic damage once things reopen.
I see the problem as a lack of agility of the economy. The hospitality works could have another job, but those jobs can't get created fast enough. How can they get paid by other people rather than the government.
Another question is post-covid do we want to ramp up consumption again. Do we need people flying to hotels to meet up, or will Zoom do? And if Zoom will do, what of the hospitality industry (already taking a stab wound from Airbnb etc.).
There shouldn't need to be any debt involved. It should be as simple as printing money (the central bank can do this) and distributing it to the people who need it. Normally this would cause excessive inflation because it would be injecting extra money into the economy. But it shouldn't in this case because it's injecting money that was already there until very recently.
And as my sibling comment mentioned, eliminating first past the post would, in my opinion, be a gigantic improvement. If you’re in Massachusetts, please vote Yes on 2 this election so we can have ranked choice voting statewide.
In contrast, the Republican party stole medical supplies from blue states[0] during the acute phase of the pandemic and chose to minimize the federal response to SARS-CoV-2 because the pandemic was only killing Democrats[1]. Depriving your political opponents of medical supplies during a pandemic is arguably a crime against humanity.
Neither of these choices are particularly good, but one choice is far worse than the other.
[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-admin-seizing-ppe/
[1] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/07/how-jared-kushners-s...
Better than term limits would be an informed electorate who would vote for a new person once the old one stopped caring or being effective. I think limits are a poor bandaid.
I would imagine people are experiencing such things already seeing as how it’s been seven months with nothing but a single $1200 check.
The generic one which I detached was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890238 - detach means it's no longer a reply to your comment but is rather a top-level comment that can therefore float to a lower location on the page.
There's nothing wrong with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24890238 either. It was just more generic. Also important to understand: the moderation decision is not primarily about a comment, it's about the entire subtree. I don't want people to feel blamed for what they posted, especially when it was other commenters who ended up going further off topic.