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Comment by Taniwha | Hacker News Reader

We addressed this in New Zealand when we went into deep lockdown (only allowed out for exercise and supermarket, everything else closed) back in March - what the government did was essentially trickle up relief (we all know now that trickle down doesn't work) - what they provided was a wage subsidy that companies could claim to pay employees who were locked down's wages - not a fixed puny lump sum, not a gift to big biz, something to keep people connected with their employers so that after we could easily start everything back up again.

It wasn't cheap, but locking absolutely everyone down for a couple of months was way cheaper that the alternative in the long run - surely the US could have done this - you pay far higher taxes than we do in NZ, money really shouldn't be an option

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The US should have done this. We could have done it. We don’t know the total economic damage yet, but I would wager it is already many times what it would have cost to do what New Zealand did.

The problem is a huge chunk of the country flies into a rage at the thought of their tax dollars going to people who “don’t work.”

Combine this with decades of Republican rhetoric about “welfare queens,” [1] separating the undeserving poor (read: black and Hispanic people) from the deserving poor... it convinces white voters to hurt themselves just so those people don’t get something that they don’t deserve.

Racism warps American politics again and again and again. I used to live in Atlanta, a city with some of the worst traffic in the country. It lacks adequate public transit because white homeowners didn’t want black people coming to their suburbs [2]. So now everyone suffers.

Our political system is diseased.

[1]: https://newrepublic.com/article/154404/myth-welfare-queen

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/traf...

I think it'd be the opposite reaction if the US adopted the NZ strategy. People would be outraged that the money is going to companies, especially large corporations where most people work. Someone would come up with the statistic that 80% of the money went to the richest 100 companies in the US or something.

That would be true if corporations were just given money. But as I understand it, that's not what NZ did.

The US actually did a fairly smart thing with the initial aid package - corporations got loans that were forgiven if used to pay wages. The problem was that we (the government) didn't do anything to establish whether a company actually needed help with this.

I wonder why that happened ....

It will forever be a mystery as to why there was so much corruption surrounding the Covid business loans and payments.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-06-16/hiltzik-co...

There was also a ton of fraud (some estimates were 1/3 of the money went to scammers and foreign people). They didn't have a good way to check if a business was an actual business or not. This resulted in entire neighborhoods of people getting 10K each by sharing the scam [2].

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-12-24/small-bus...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/small-bus...

What's the demographic of the scammers? Are they immoral rich people who don't need the money and just love the idea of scamming the government? Are they poor people desperate enough to steal from the government? If the latter then the stimulus was actually quite well spent.

A lot of the money went to gangs in foreign countries. There were some stories of immoral rich people like the rapper who got over a million dollars and boasted about it, but I imagine most were dishonest poor people. The problem is this rewards a small pool of scammers, and the honest poor are left even further behind.

But it sounds like you want to believe it was money well spent, so I don't imagine this would convince you otherwise.

Left wing rant aside, California, which is not exactly known for it’s right wing leanings has done absolutely horrible with Covid. Not only has it failed to contain the virus it’s almost last in rolling out the vaccine (well behind those racist Red states you call out like TX).

I wonder how much of that is due to the lack of leadership from our President

Not very much? California has plenty of vaccines now, they just can't work out the last mile to distribute them. If only there was a valley in there somewhere that had people who had thought about things like this before...

I like this reply because not only does it strawman my opinion of “red” states, it boils down to, “I’m going to brush aside your substantive points because did you know some states are run badly by LIBERALS???”

Well, since your entire rant was "we could be like New Zealand if it weren't for racist Republicans", I wouldn't call it a straw man by giving an example of "a racist Republican state" doing a better job than a state that's been run by liberals for decades.

Kind of proves your point wrong, no?

unfortunately the de facto embrace of reaganomics and welfare queen rhetoric is completely bicameral. the orthodox position is that aid flowing to people who 'don't deserve it' is a far more unthinkable sin than aid getting to almost no one at the bottom after being delayed indefinitely by a broken social support system that is deliberately designed to demoralize and humiliate people who need help.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, the US did do something very similar. A lump sum to individuals + huge increase to unemployment insurance + grants to businesses with the stipulation that they don't lay people off.

Sometimes I think everyone is so caught up in the narrative that nothing progressive ever happens in the US that they don't stop to celebrate wins like the CARES act, because it was frankly a huge win for the progressive agenda even if temporary.

But anyway, we did the expensive part of spending all the money. We just forgot to do the second part of locking people down and getting the virus under control. People were mostly always free to hang out with friends and family and congregate anywhere that wasn't closed. In some places there was better messaging in terms of trying to guilt people into not doing that, and calling it a "lockdown". But I don't know of anywhere in the country that actually had any consequences for individual people that chose to just ignore the guidelines (occasional businesses or organizers of large gatherings got fined, but not individuals).

The government paid business to pay workers? That sounds trickle down?

And no, the US has lower tax rates (30% bracket starts at $48k NZD?).

you're not comparing apples and apples - NZ doesn't have state taxes, you at least need to include those.

When I lived in the US (up until 2004) my top marginal rate was 33% plus 9.5% (CA) state tax, in NZ it is 33% - sales taxes are different (higher in NZ).

The govt paid workers through their businesses - but the amount paid was based on the payrolls - that money went to the workers.

Yeah, but the 33% US federal bracket kicks in at $200k versus $70k in NZ.

But sure, if you take the highest tax states in the US the difference isn’t that great. But compare it to say WA (no state tax) and it’s a big difference.

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