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Comment by supperburg | Hacker News Reader

Labor prices will return to normal once people run out of savings and stimulus checks.

The stimulus checks totaled out to what $3,000? That at most covers 2 months of rent in the city. Or maybe a few months of car payments and food. If the stimulus checks were a significant portion of your income that money has been long gone.

While true, what is not being taken into account is the excess money people have from not traveling, eating out, driving to work, paying for child care, etc. How about inheritances from 700,000 dead parents who’s retirements were cut short by Covid? This has little to do with stimulus checks and more to do with financial and lifestyle changes.

Nobody pays rent…

The stimulus checks were months ago. If the status quo was so fragile that two $1000-ish checks to every working/middle class American was enough to shatter it, then it probably deserved to be broken.

First round: $1,200 per adult, $500 per child

Second round: $600 per adult, $600 per child

Third round: $1,400 per adult, $1,400 per child

(https://www.pgpf.org/blog/2021/03/what-to-know-about-all-thr...)

So, as an example, a family with two adults and three kids would have received $13,900 in total.

Morals/politics etc aside, I think supperberg's argument makes sense.

You think that a family of two adults and three kids can live for over a year on $13,900 and still have some money left over from that?

That wasn't the "terms". It was savings + checks. Then you added "have some left".

It obviously depends a lot on the location.

I think that a family of two adults and 3 kids will keep one of the adults home in lieu of paying for (with COVID, rather unreliable) child care if they can instead collect $14k plus unemployment.

They also weren’t paying any rent, so yes

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