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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

The unemployment rate is also very low. We just lost a lot of workers to covid or people figuring out how to make ends meet without work during the quarantine, like families realizing that having one parent stay home to raise the kids is cheaper than daycare even with the second paycheck. The whole "no one wants to work" narrative is a lie from companies that are unwilling to respond to market forces.

Hell even if no one actually wanted to work, that's still something you have to deal with as a business the same way you have to deal with if no one wants to buy what you're selling

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Nobody wants to work for low rates if there is an alternative.

We didn't lose many workers to Covid. The vast majority of deaths were among the elderly.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

In the scale of things, I could imagine a combination of the 200k people who died (those below retirement age) and the 2 million people who were hospitalized (who knows what kind of long term effects they had, also below retirement age) and also the 80 million who had symptomatic illness (how many of them have long Covid now?) we might see a needle moved in the job sector… especially if the losses are in specific professions that had more exposure to people…

It's difficult for businesses to compete with the government printing massive amounts of money and giving it to people to not work.

That’s a narrative that is very convenient for companies big companies, who can very cheaply pay people to spread it around.

There’s a different narrative that goes like this: those companies fired a bunch of people during lockdown, and the government decided to intervene and give them money (not enough to cover the rent and food expenses while lockdown)

Have some “profiteered” from that? Probably. It’s a big number of people. For a lot of people it wasn’t enough. So they found other ways to survive.

Now the companies (who let’s remember, shacked everyone in the first place) want to go back to how things were before. With same rates. And the pandemic hasn’t finished yet (there’s new variants going on). In this context, would it be wise for people to go back? A lot of them have been forced into finding something else (which is more pandemic-resilient). Cutting expenses, moving out of big cities, etc. Another lockdown and they would be fired again.

It looks like a bad deal to me.

> those companies fired a bunch of people during lockdown

Oh you mean when the government essentially shut down their businesses?

Here in Sweden the government didn't shut down much of the economy. Guess what happens during a pandemic? People don't go shopping, to restaurants, or consume much outside of their homes.

It's a bullshit argument, the pandemic causes a downturn for in-person businesses anyway.

Also, offices and other businesses that kept open had issues with staffing due to sickness. Go figure...

A global pandemic caused the lockdown that made it harder to operate their businesses in the same way as before.

They are unable or unwilling to adapt, and did not have enough savings to continue fulfilling their workers employment contracts.

Then the government took care of its citizens financial welfare.

I am not seeing any governmental missteps here. Can you make it more clear where they went wrong?

> A global pandemic caused the lockdown

No. A global pandemic caused disease and death. Governments imposed lockdowns.

Maybe that was the right course of action, maybe it wasn't. But it's done now, and now we have to pay for the cost of the Covid response, something we'll probably be doing for the rest of our lives.

Over a million people in the US died of COVID (officially), and untold more developed permanent injuries as a side effect of being infected. What "cost" are we paying from lockdowns, compared to the cost in lives and lost potential?

That's a non sequitur. There's no reliable evidence that more people would have died without lockdowns. The lockdowns were an irrational overreaction and largely ineffective.

Sure, but certainly more people would have gotten sick. And if they get sick all at once, the medical system is overwhelmed and those without treatment would die.

The argument is only rhetorical because all governments in every country imposed some sort of lockdown or everyone stayed home willingly.

As I read before, this article[0] summarises quite well what I think about people who spout this bullshit about economies and markets during a fucking pandemic. It's their Moloch.

For this kind of people, capitalist supremacists, sacrifice of human lives to the market is ok, might be "sad" but it's necessary in their worldview.

[0] https://kitanyaharrison.medium.com/the-economy-of-moloch-hum...

And a lot of people died or suffered injuries due to lack of routine medical care.

The mental health problems for many have been enormous.

There are huge educational gaps that have been created due to missed school.

Inflation from overspending is ruining many peoples lives.

Even in its massive printing of money, the government gave about $13,000 of stimulus to 150 million households across 2 years (this is counting things like increased unemployment benefits, food assistance, delayed student loan payments, etc). This puts the stimulus at below the second decile for income for a single year. Even for the most frugal of households, the money the government handed them long ago ran out.

This is not correct. There were a multitude of payments given out besides stimulus. The CARES act alone gave $600/week of federal money for 17 weeks, totaling almost 11k. You are vastly underestimating the amount of aid given for unemployment. It's been so widely known that it's become a meme: the unemployed person making more money playing xbox than they did when they had to work.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/total-covid-relief-unemployment-in...

[2] https://twitter.com/MarcGoldwein/status/1371277417600454658

I wasn’t just talking about the stimulus checks. 2 trillion is the entirety of extra money spent by the federal government on individuals over the course of the various pandemic bills. (There was another 2.5-3 trillion of spending, but that was spent on other interest groups such as businesses and medical providers)

You’re right that the maximum amount of money an individual could have received from the government is quite high. But for every household that received more than the 13k I stated above, other households received proportionally less. (Which is to say while undoubtably some people lived the meme you mentioned, the vast majority of people weren’t given that much money) Plus it doesn’t change the main point that the spending stopped in Sept 2021. We’re two months off from it having been a year since extra unemployment benefits were a factor.

How much money did the government give to people to not work and during which time period?

It's obviously extremely difficult to give a number because of the wide variety of situations and differences by state, but it has been widely reported to be extremely generous to those who do not work.

Estimates range from 50k [1] to 100k [2]. People were getting $600 per week in federal unemployment alone [3], which is more than many jobs pay.

> NPR spoke to Katharine Thomas, who works the cash register at a small food co-op in Wisconsin. Thomas remembers seeing people around her lose jobs and collect the state unemployment income plus the extra federal relief of $600 a week.

> "I felt very angry," she says. "I have to go to work. And I make less money, being essential. $600 a week — that's almost the whole paycheck for me. Even with hazard pay, I still don't make that much money."

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/total-covid-relief-unemployment-in...

[2] https://twitter.com/MarcGoldwein/status/1371478357418909703

[3] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/27/895674685/-600-a-week-poverty...

So the end date of the benefits is Sep 6, 2021. Is the claim here that the additional income was so high that people still no longer have to work in Jul 2022?

And the amount of benefits received is calculated based on people with children earning $60k per year in GA and $80k in MA (a very high cost of living state). Either way, both of these figures are above median incomes, so is the claim here that people with above median incomes quit their jobs in order to collect temporary benefits and then never re entered the workforce?

Oh shit is that still occurring? Weird I thought that ended a while ago but obviously if you’re this angry the government must have a line item for making sure no one works currently.

No possible way that ended ages ago but is still being used as a talking point for why shitty companies can’t respond to systematic changes in the market

I believe this[0] was on HN's front page a few days ago.

[0] https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1549527748950892544

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