US Unemployment Rate Soars To 14.7%, the Worst Since the Depression Era (washingtonpost.com) 166
The U.S. unemployment rate jumped to 14.7 percent in April, the highest level since the Great Depression, as many businesses shut down or severely curtailed operations to try and limit the spread of the deadly coronavirus. From a report: The Labor Department said 20.5 million people abruptly lost their jobs, wiping out a decade of employment gains in a single month. The speed and magnitude of the loss defies comparison. It is roughly double what the nation experienced during the entire 2007-09 crisis. As the virus's rapid spread accelerated in March, President Trump and numerous governors imposed restrictions that led businesses to suddenly shed millions of workers, putting the economy in a deep freeze. Analysts warn it could take many years to return to the 3.5 percent unemployment rate the nation experienced in February in part because it's unclear what a new economy will look like even if scientists make progress on a vaccine, testing, and treatment.
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Re:Stagflation (Score:5, Interesting)
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Its not just the Fed going Brrrr. The Fed has signed swaps with 13 major economies which means they can go Brrrr and swap their local currencies for USD at a fixed rate. In effect all 13 of these countries have been granted the right to print USD.
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These are not unilateral. These are bilateral 3 month swaps. The Fed HAS to accept say any new Indian Rupees the Govt of India prints to pay people to stay at home during their lockdown and give dollars to the Govt of India. This lets all countries do stimulus without affecting the exchange rate. Helps to keep foreign trade stable by keeping the exchange rate stable.
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Not hard to imagine how much better we'd already be if people took this virus and early lockdowns seriously and PPE production was vastly increased the moment this was known about, months ago.
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A vaccine may be a year or more away. The economy can't stay closed that long. So our only hope is herd immunity. The lockdowns and PPE are an impediment to that.
If you have no elderly in your household, then it is best for society if you and your family are infected early.
The initial lockdowns were needed to ramp up healthcare capacity. That is now done. By continuing the lockdowns we are paying an enormous economic price just to delay the inevitable.
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"let's all get infected as soon as possible
That is not what I said. Of course we don't want everyone infected at once. But as long as the hospitals have spare capacity to handle bad cases, it is better to be building up herd immunity so we don't get overwhelmed later.
especially if you have vulnerable family members."
This is the opposite of what I said.
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I didn't see your "no" at first. Well that's different. [youtu.be]
I'm so ready to expect the worst from people online these days. I still don't like it... you're practically asking to treat this like chicken pox. That's a tough sell.
Slashdot is always a month behind the times.. (Score:5, Informative)
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hilarious isn't it, small and medium business with 500 or less employees employs (should I use past tense?) half the people, and is 45 percent of GDP, but they are being utterly destroyed in favor of the big corporations and stock market is doing dandy, fed says no fundamental damage to supply chain.
Funny like a heart attack
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Small companies are literally being given grants (PPP loans) to pay payroll.
The govt is not doing this for large companies and instead asking them to raise funds on the capital market which is being backstopped by the fed saying if noone buys your bonds we will buy them.
Re: Slashdot is always a month behind the times.. (Score:2)
The payroll grants don't really benefit the small business except that they can more easily scale back up after the pandemic. But it doesn't help them pay rent went their revenue dries up.
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Rent is taken care of through a halt on evictions. Dont pay rent. Its not like the landlord is paying their mortgage. They have a deferral on mortgages too.
Re: Slashdot is always a month behind the times.. (Score:2)
Even if they can't be evicted, though, they're wracking up back rent that will have to get paid at some point. In terms of cash handouts, small businesses seem to be getting screwed.
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Small companies are literally being given grants (PPP loans) to pay payroll.
The govt is not doing this for large companies and instead asking them to raise funds on the capital market which is being backstopped by the fed saying if noone buys your bonds we will buy them.
Most of us did not receive a PPP loan, because the banks used their discretion to award them to their preferred clients first. Those of us who put in for ten thousand dollars were told that the funds had run out, while the bankers gave multi-million dollar loans to their friends.
This is not a hypothetical. This is a first hand account.
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We actually want people to stay home if they are not essential. The unemployment is for that. The PPP is for companies that are essential but uneconomical to run (say restaurants running at 50%) If the payroll is taken care of by loans then a restaurant becomes economical to run at 50% (or takeout only)
These companies should be raising wages to compensate people for working during a pandemic (the wages are being paid by PPP so its not coming out of their bottomline)
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"is impossible because their workers want the extra $600/week that unemployment is currently giving them through the CARES act."
So they raise their salaries to compensate.
Alternatively, simply giving everyone 1k a month instead of a single $1200 check without means testing would simultaneously provide a safety net and likely increase spending while removing much of the incentive to “keep looking” when you get that job and check at the same time. Excess money would add to the liquidity and bottom line and make for a bottom up bailout that ultimately would help small businesses more than the payroll loans when they don’t have the necessary sales volumes.
Buy on the rumor, sell on the news? (Score:2)
Well, something is clearly broken. The (not really so) old theory was that the rumors would motivate buying that would drive up the prices, while the actual news would crash the hopes and trigger the selling that then crashed the stock prices, too. So today we have the hard news about the latest and unGREATest Trumpian unemployment rate, and the market jumps up like someone just announced the invention of sliced bread. Makes perfect sense to me. /sarcasm
So we've already passed the Vietnam death toll. This m
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Stocks are about to skyrocket with the Fed promising to buy everything with an unlimited amount of money. Trillions will go into the market before EOY. The DOW could double from here.
But your UBI will have to be paid in million-dollar bills. Which you will carry around in a wheelbarrow.
We have hard choices to make (Score:3, Insightful)
Sooner or later, we're going to have to decide if the extreme measures we're taking to combat the spread of COVID is worth the economic carnage. And it's not just a simple matter of "muh stock options". Unemployment has real, life and death consequences. Making the money printers go Brrrrrrrr has its own hazards. At some point we're going to have to bite the bullet and realize that we can't continue to keep the country in shutdown mode much longer. And yes, that's going to mean some death. It's a matter of death and misery from the disease vs. death and misery from Depression-level economic damage.
Considering that by far the greater number of deaths come from the elderly in nursing homes, perhaps a balance could be found with hyper-vigilant protection of the old in such facilities along with a rollback of public-at-large measures to a more reasonable level. The not-elderly, after all, seem to be recovering fairly quickly.
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Re: We have hard choices to make (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, but what about all the people who work at nursing homes? Their families? The doctors that treat the elderly for normal age related ailments? The staff for their offices/hospitals? Their families? The vendors who supply and deliver to those nursing homes and doctors offices/hospitals? Simply "locking down" the elderly and vulnerable while the rest of us went on with our lives simply isn't possible.
Re:We have hard choices to make (Score:5, Insightful)
So the solution to the PPE and shortage and limited patient capacity was to somehow give protective equipment to 15-30% of the population and then still flood the medical facilities way beyond their capacity and have all the excess patients die?
330 million (American population) * 0.85 (non elderly percentage in US) * 0.02 (approximate hospitalization rate for non-elderly COVID cases) = 5.6 million people you will need to cram into our 1 million hospital beds
Meanwhile, how do you handle the logistics of your plan to cordon off that big chunk of the population? Working out the details, dedicating the people to run and administer it, diverting resources. The elderly often need assistance in general and may be in a deteriorated mental state. How are you going to selectively keep them out of society? Since you are going to skip a lockdown you need to figure out and implement all of that *instantly* before the virus spreads.
Assuming you actually can do all that, I still think it's a terrible idea. Because at the start of the pandemic - and even now - the parameters of the virus are big unknowns. Populations and demographics continue to have different infection rates and mortality rates and we still don't know why. It was never a given America wasn't going to be even worse than Italy, elderly population or not. Our measurements of infection rate and mortality rate were only guesses and may still be wrong (although the error bars have grown smaller).
And we continue to know little about the long term health consequences for people who seem able to survive the virus. It's seeming they are subject to increased risk of stroke, kidney and heart problems, respiratory problems, and neurological issues. In some cases it is triggering immune disorders. Doesn't appear to linger in reservoirs in the body but that's not a ruled out possibility either. Will it affect fertility, cause birth defects? "Infect everyone with a novel virus" is just not a good idea even once you have some data that most can survive it.
We may have to make some tradeoffs to keep civilization going but if it was possible to lock down for a month or two in the face of an unknown pandemic then IMHO it was a very good idea to do so. My main concern is whether we have made as much of that time as we should have.
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330 million (American population) * 0.85 (non elderly percentage in US) * 0.02 (approximate hospitalization rate for non-elderly COVID cases) = 5.6 million people you will need to cram into our 1 million hospital beds
Yes, if everyone caught the virus on the exact same day, we would be 4+ million beds short. Except, people recover in about 2 weeks. So, as long as everyone getting infected is spread out over 2 months or so, we have enough beds. Since it probably won't be perfectly distributed, let's call it over 4 months so we don't have local shortages.
Do you really think we would have the disease spread through 100% of the population in only 4 months? Even measles, which is almost 10x as contagious didn't manage that
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There is a monetary "value of life", as bad as it sounds. If you look at it logically, money is a proxy for work and time from someone else's life. Are you willing to spend 3/4 of your working time keeping e.g. one other person alive?
That value is pretty high, I think for govt use they put it at ~ $10mil/person. If you look at that I think they said it's worth it for the shutdown to go on for a while, I think it was up to like 6 months. That's without "discounting" the fact that it's primarily older people
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The issue is lawsuits. You can open your business back up but if you are not careful you will get sued for not protecting employees and customers.
That's why the government needs to say when and what measures are needed so that employers can shield themselves by doing them. And then the government will get sued instead.
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Lawsuits operate under the law. Politicians make the law. Law has to be adjusted to suit circumstances.
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Congress has the constitutional power to forbid certain kinds of lawsuits. They last did this by forbidding suing restaurants for salty, fatty foods. As the cigarette lawsuits were winding up, the greedy lawyers turned their eyes to restaurants.
They need to do the same here for companies in general. No lawsuits because a virus spread. We don't need a trillion dollars flowing into the pockets of functional parasitic ticks.
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Under capitalism the value of life is precisely zero. Capitalist economics is not going to solve this problem. Only political intervention can solve it. Physics says that a nuclear bomb will destroy your enemy, it is politics that decides whether to use nuclear bombs.
Re:We have hard choices to make (Score:5, Interesting)
Sooner or later, we're going to have to decide if the extreme measures we're taking to combat the spread of COVID is worth the economic carage.
The thing is if you aren't careful, you get both. I don't want to go to the movies, or a restaurant, or a department store when there is a fair chance it could be fatal to me or a loved one.
Sweden does not have official lockdowns, but their economy is expected to shrink by as much as their neighbors https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/3... [cnbc.com] with several times the mortality rate https://www.politifact.com/fac... [politifact.com].
So the "extreme measures" may actually save money (if only in funeral expenses)
Studies show the cities that locked down in 1918 (Score:2)
The push to reopen now is just so we can kick people off unemployment.
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Yes, but moreso the ones that locked down earlier fared better. Let's not forget that they [in many cases] weren't really locked down for any longer than we're doing now, and that was a much more severe pandemic, with dier consequences for people of all ages:
https://www.nationalgeographic... [nationalgeographic.com]
Reopening now, slowly, won't kick people off unemployment unless they're going back to work, which is a good outcome for all. Nice attempt to frame the narrative to fit your political beliefs, though.
Rate vs amount (Score:3)
Re:Rate vs amount (Score:5, Interesting)
. No matter how much you flatten the curve, 70% of the population will need get sick at some point before this is over.
You keep saying that lie over and over, and I'm going to give you some charts to look at that prove you wrong.
Look at the second chart on this page [worldometers.info]. Look at it closely. Do you see how the number of new infections has dropped? Do you understand that the vaccine will exist before most of the country catches COVID? Let's look at another one.
Look at the second chart on this page [worldometers.info]. They turned the Coronavirus trend around. With masks, thermometers, and contact tracing, we can turn the virus around and restart the economy.
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You forget that although it took a couple of decades no one dies of aids these days because we learned how the disease works and found a way of preventing it from killing people. We already know that SARS-CoV-2 kills by blood clotting as an epithelial blood disease and we can envisage ways of treating this already. Science works ye of little faith.
Re: Rate vs amount (Score:2)
The rate in Sweden is flat, with sings of decreasing. Go look at the data, please!
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Let's see how Sweden fares with the Covid double tap that's likely to come this fall during flu season.
I wager they'll be better off -- ripping off the bandage as it were.
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Five days into the "reopening" in Florida, restaurants only allowed to open at 25% still looked empty on a Friday night. They would have been better off staying closed and saving the operational expense. Better yet, time to find a new model - perhaps kitchen-only on a permanent basis. A lot of people are really enjoying the revival of this mysterious ancient custom of eating at home. And who needs a theater?
I cut my own hair with clippers and found it to be no different than paying someone while taking far
Re:We have hard choices to make (Score:5, Insightful)
At some point we're going to have to bite the bullet and realize that we can't continue to keep the country in shutdown mode much longer.
Well according to the CDC, we weren't really supposed to be closed this long to begin with anyway. Just as soon as all that testing finally gets out there... Just any day now...
But in all seriousness, the entire point of the shelter in place wasn't to make sure nobody got the disease, it was to give everyone involved enough time to mount some sort of response. So clearly the response is [404: None found]. I mean, I'm not surprised that the US couldn't rise up to meet this challenge. But I have to admit, the just tossing of hands into the air is something I wasn't expecting. I mean for the most powerful country on this planet to just basically indicate, "Welp, nothing we can do about it. Guess you all have to die. We did the shelter thing, didn't work, we're all out of options. Now everyone go die like good worker bees." I think I could cut the apathy with a knife from here.
Considering that by far the greater number of deaths come from the elderly in nursing homes, perhaps a balance could be found with hyper-vigilant protection of the old in such facilities along with a rollback of public-at-large measures
You know, at this point I'd be happy if they just sent a package of Walmart thermometers to the nursing homes. That would actually be something, but I don't think this country could even muster that after seeing how oh so well the response has been thus far. I mean for fucks sake everyone stayed home a month-plus in some places and all that free space to work in, couldn't even get the things that they said they were sending out, to actually get out. SMH
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Given that the news is all about the dire politics of a mediocre politician shooting out rubbish emotional propaganda to get re-elected I share your frustration. However the scientific community are making big strides in both understanding the disease and finding out how to beat it. This sadly in post science America does not make the news. Given current progress I think that the death rate could be halved within a month or two by new treatments. Not Hydroxychlorquinine. I regret to say that Trump has been
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In the ideal world, we would have used this time to implement some variant of proven mitigation protocols (e.g. South Korea) that didn't involve 100% lock-down. Instead it looks like we're going to suggest to people that maybe they should just go risk dying.
Re: We have hard choices to make (Score:2)
Pretty much none of the typical problems associated with printing money apply right now. The $ is deflating.
There's more hazard in our record low interest rates than there is in printing money in this economy. The problem with printing money is simply that it won't fix the systemic problems without consumers willing to go out and shop.
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The answer is the Government is throwing trillions at business to prop up stock prices. It's no longer about making, producing, selling, it's about how much payola do I get? How much cash can I use to buy back stock- essentially using taxpayer funds to bonus ownership.
Last time we had a depression, we initiated enormous public works pr
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Considering we are 20Trillion in debt or more, it's all on the credit card anyway. Has been for a while.
Also, some of you sound really scared of this. Scared to the level you are deeply concerned about even going to the grocery store because you might die. I mean, that's true every single day of your life anyway. The world has all sorts of nasty stuff in it that could get you without you doing anything wrong.
I'm just saying try and take a deep breath. Keep your social distance but things will be okay. Peopl
Re:We have hard choices to make (Score:5, Insightful)
The media has been conditioning people to be in a constant state of fear. They're giddy that it might hurt Trump.
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Do you know who owns the vast majority of stocks and bonds? Pension funds and private retirement accounts. Wiping out the retirement savings of the elderly is going to kill a lot more of them than the virus will. If the Fed wasn't propping up the markets about 20 states would be immediately insolvent as well. They were technically already insolvent but a crash would be an immediate Game Over.
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Sure a weird way to implement socialism, give other peoples money to the rich so they can trickle some down rather then directly to the needy who were stupid enough to invest everything in the stock market. I guess this is the free market at work.
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The overwhelming majority of people who own stocks are not "the rich". Unfortunately it's the life savings of most workers.
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Still stupid gambling your life savings. Of course with all the recent government meddling, saving any other way is stupid too. Wish governments would let the market work instead of propping it up. They're job should be just keeping the market free.
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Most people with 401k or pension plans have no choice.
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Currently true, but it does create a perverse incentive for government to support the "too big to fail" industries to the point where fraud isn't prosecuted and is instead rewarded. Just look at the banks in 2008 compared to the S&L's in the '80's and even then you had people like McCain working furiously to let the fraudsters of the hook,likely in trade for campaign funding.
I'm probably just old but the amount of government borrowing and quantitative easing scares me.
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It's only gambling because the biggest unknown is what kinds of regulations and taxes will be added as burdens next year.
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You should check out how the market acted in the 19th century and early 20th without regulations and minimal taxes. Markets have always gone up and down, companies went bankrupt for various reasons usually involving competition, bad management or just complacency. It's only relatively recently that the government has printed money to bail out businesses or artificially prop up the stock market.
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Sooner or later, we're going to have to decide if the extreme measures we're taking to combat the spread of COVID is worth the economic carnage.
While the shutdown orders definitely hit the economy hard, it's not as if it was happily humming along without care when suddenly the brakes slammed on March 15th. People's reactions to the pandemic were already impacting large parts of the economy. The shutdown orders were more like of a strong uppercut that followed an initial hard jab.
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Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
Arstechinca has an article about how economic collapses save lives [arstechnica.com]. The lives lost to depression are lower than the lives saved to less folks dying in car wrecks and the like.
The main thing is will we, as a society, tolerate letting 20% of our population live without working for the next 18 months while we wait on treatments and a vaccine.
The push to reopen isn't about not having enough to take care of everyone, it's about not wanting people to get used to the fact that there's been plenty of food and shelter for ages and we're still living lives of quiet desperation...
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It's a matter of death and misery from the disease vs. death and misery from Depression-level economic damage.
The number dead from COVID will be much higher than the dead from a depression. Check out this graph [imgur.com]. You can see when the social distancing started, if it hadn't the red line would have just gone up and up.
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But we can't let the people know they're being fed dead old people. We need to market it with another name. What's popular now? Wheat grass? Nah that'a old.
"California" style dishes, AKA with avocado? Soybean products? Yah that'll work. Everything's soy nowadays.
Soyish? Soylike? Some suffix that means "full of", so "full of soy". -lent, according to the dictionary.
Now lets throw in some basic food coloring and we've got ourselves a product. Blue? Too unnatural. Red? Too violent and blo
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Let's start sewing some blankets we can distribute later.
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Life expectancy has been dropping the last few years, something to do with the wonderful economy I guess driving up suicides and opiate poisoning.
Re:We have hard choices to make (Score:4, Insightful)
You forget that we can also find out how to treat the sick during the curve flattening. If only we had spent the billions of dollars that we spend on military defences on viral defences. We will develop ways of saving lives during this time that change the whole picture. It took a couple of decades but we beat HIV and it is a much smarter virus. This one is easier to beat and we could have it defeated by antivirals or vaccines within a year or so. You can stick with conventional capitalist orthodoxy and create a two decade global recession or you can find a global solution.
Re:We have hard choices to make (Score:5, Insightful)
It is amazing how irrational people are being about this. People do not seem to understand that flattening the curve does not change the area under the curve: the only way we beat this thing is by reaching herd immunity.
This is a BIG LIE.
SARS was not beaten by herd immunity, nor was Ebola. Neither could we beat the flu with herd immunity.
South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Germany have shown the world that you can beat Covid-19 with proper lockdown and contact tracing. Italy and Spain are showing the world it could be done even if the virus seemed spreading out of control for a time.
A hard lockdown (the hammer) would work to stop the virus spreading no matter how widespread it was. After 3 weeks, new cases will gradually drop in the next 2 months, at a rate depending on the strength of lockdown. Based on testing and contact tracing capability, the date of reopening be projected.
What the US is doing is showing the world you can have the worst of both worlds. A weak lockdown that is enough to kill your economy but not enough to slow the virus. You never see when it will end because the virus was not really contained. Soon you can only choose between bad (harden lockdown, start over), worse (continue the weak lockdown with no end in sight) and even worse (reopen, let people die and economy crash even more).
18.5 Million on furlough (Score:3, Insightful)
Out of the 20 million 18.5 million said they are on furlough and expect to get their job back once economy opens up. At the bottom of the pyramid the Enhanced Unemployment means people take home is higher unemployed than employed using PPP loans. Hence unemployment is high even though PPP loans were given to keep people on the rolls.
e.g. Cheesecake factory has furloughed its staff but keeping them covered on benefits and also offering a free meal a day so that the staff is coming in and keeping in touch with the management. This will make it easier to rehire them when the economy reopens.
Re:18.5 Million on furlough (Score:5, Informative)
They may think that, but 52% of small businesses surveyed expect to be permanently closed with 6 months.
No restaurant can make money at 50% occupancy, just for starters.
Re: 18.5 Million on furlough (Score:2)
The ones that have huge catering roots they will.
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Capitalism's "start" button hard to find (Score:5, Interesting)
When capitalism stalls, nobody has yet figured out how to jump-start it relatively quickly. It requires a healthy cycle of consumers and employers, and each are tied to the other, and also tied down by each other, creating a Catch-22. The causes of the Great Depression's depth are still highly debated.
If we had the collective discipline to pay down the debt, we could have had a big juicy infrastructure stimulus, which is needed because shit is falling apart everywhere. But we didn't, limiting our options. We fucked ourselves by not holding politicians to a higher standard.
IF it appears we are going to be stuck in a 1930's-like rut when a recovery fails to appear after several months, then temporary socialism may be needed so people at least have jobs, food, and homes.
Remember, the Great Depression was ultimately only ended by a great war triggered by the anguish of the Depression itself. (Public works projects did improve the situation, but didn't fully snap us out of it.)
Let's learn from that lesson.
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IF it appears we are going to be stuck in a 1930's-like rut when a recovery fails to appear after several months, then temporary socialism may be needed so people at least have jobs, food, and homes.
Socialism?!? One taste and you’re addicted, once addicted you start to question if the whole “fk you got mine” mentality is working when being dumped on by society so hard for not having enough despite busting ass. Pretty soon you want worker protections, consumer protections, a clean environment, and a happier and healthier population that lives longer. This ultimately will culminate in a *shudders* desire for a democratic work environment where the means of production has a say in h
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Re: Capitalism's "start" button hard to find (Score:2)
Why rant so, when you aren't going to respond to what they actually said? Just seems a waste of effort.
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It's capitalism's fault government shut down capitalism. Brilliant.
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In my jurisdiction, UI pays only 60% of your last wage, up to a maximum of something that's only nominally better than what a full-time minimum wage worker would also make.
UI is better than nothing, but it's nowhere near "that ballpark".
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Massive unemployment is assured anyway because all jobs will be replaced by AI over the next 30 years in developed western economies.
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all jobs will be replaced by AI over the next 30 years
Too late. Most jobs have already been replaced by the McCormick Reaper.
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Leave out the kids and that becomes 6 trillion a year. US govt spends 4 trillion at the federal level and 2 trillion at the state level so about the same as what is raised through taxes today.
Say 4 trillion of this is social spending which can be cut and replaced with a UBI (No SS, no Medicare, no medicaid, no foodstamps, no schools, no free emergency rooms) so we need 2 trillion for all other parts of govt (1 Trillion for the military/VA/CIA and 1 Trillion for the rest of govt)
So with 8 trillion of taxes
Re: Time for UBI (Score:2)
With most proposed UBI schemes not everyone gets the money anyway as o er a certain income threshold that money ends up needing to be paid back at tax time.
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Re: Time for UBI (Score:2)
Thats....exactly what I said......
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The whole point of UBI is to get rid of the bureacracy of means tested programs - the whole legion of Social security, Section 8, Medicaid, Child Services bureacrats who are just a tax on the system without contributing anything. The only way to do that is make it universal and automatic. As soon as you try to chooses winners and losers a bureacracy will grow.
Just start a bank account for every child when they get a SSN allocated and start depositing their UBI into it. Give them access to the bank account a
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1) We will just imagine that everyone will make good financial decisions until the most ardent deniers of human nature finally give up pretending that this will happen.
2) We will then recreate all the social programs that bypassed peoples bad decision making, such as food stamps and direct rent payments to landlords.
3)
4) Loss!
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SS was only sustainable because lots of other people were paying into it.
Unemployment was only sustainable because lots of other people were paying into it.
Those welfare programs were only sustainable because lots of other people were paying into it.
Right now. Today. None of it is sustainable. It is all being monetized by the printing of currency.
The negative effects of printing this currency will compound as time
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Thing is that money is meaningless. The products are still there with the infrastructure to make them and the consumers are still there to buy them. Not just in the US but globally. The whole globe has a problem with money but not with the economy because the economy is still there but the money has failed. There has to be a global macroeconomic solution such as creating 200 year bonds with a stupidly low interest rate that all governments can use or something. Otherwise you are looking at a couple of decad
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Once the economy gets going again at least 80% of those unemployed will be back at work. The unemployment rate will drop like a rock.
Many, yes... but you need confidence in your paycheck to have confidence spending unless you have substantial equity. It's going to take a while before people trust that the rug won't get pulled out from under them again.
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That's why we need for things to get back to normal as soon as possible
Just opening everything right now will not bring things "back to normal." Not even close.
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This all looks fine unless you get the second wave of the virus. Then it fails.
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This all looks fine unless you get the second wave of the virus. Then it fails.
People will continue to practice social distancing. Even if the 2nd wave is bigger than the 1st, our medical capacity is higher now. We can deal with it.
If a vaccine was a month away, it may make sense to wait. But it is likely a year or more before a vaccine will be available.
So the choices are to wait for a year, leading to economic catastrophe, or open now.
If we wait for a few more weeks or months, then what are we waiting for? What are we acomplishing with the delay?
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So if the people don't go back to normal, why do you expect the economy to?
I wear a mask when grocery shopping. But I don't buy fewer groceries.
Some businesses, such as hairdressers and barbers, require close proximity. So many people will avoid them. But most businesses can go back to normal.
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Fuck off with this Troll shit. The whole world is suffering due to this virus, not just hurr durr "Trump's America"
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>"Actually the lowest unemployment rate in history was 1.2% in 1944."
True, but it is hard to use that period as being terribly valid for most discussions of employment, since we were knee-deep in a world war. I should probably have said something like "in my lifetime" or "in the last 50 years."