We should have explicitly been paying people to stay home, but somehow the $1200 + the $600 unemployment bump became welfare payments, and morons were giving speeches about how they were incentivizing people to stay home. No shit.
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.
actually, paying people more in unemployment than they made working is great public health policy for maintaining quarantine, aligning financial incentives with desired behavior. quite shocking that the US government managed to get it done.
COVID wasn't a lack of employment problem, everyone had jobs, the government decided to pay people to stay home. It was a handout specifically aimed at not building anything at all.
I always thought the point was to keep people home during the pandemic instead of working odd jobs to compensate. Incentivizing people to not work by paying them more to stay at home was a public health policy choice. Of course, the bills were passed really rapidly and maybe weren’t that thought out.
Maybe the government should have paid people so they could stay home? But that's communism and then no one will work and who will bring us our McDonald's order during the outbreak
whatever value your argument may have, it's not relevant to Covid.
Stay at home...OK, but I need to eat, pay rent etc etc. Here's some money from our tax pool to survive this (hopefully) once in a century thing. Not 100% efficient and some benefited more than others but that's a small price to pay for sending cash ASAP to people. That kept the economy from TOTAL collapse and people from starving. That's why we have a government
During a pandemic, that’s the point! You don’t want desperate people staying in the workforce and spreading the virus which kills more people. Having people stay home is what was supposed to happen!
But then they would never work again! Look at where rent moratorium and $6,000 got us!
/s
Sorry, hearing this ^ bs logic every day in outlets from WSJ to NPR is beyond frustrating. We have helped our citizens so little during a pandemic it has shaken my already cynical core.
But is anyone seriously advocating keeping a $600/week around after the quarantine? If we can get out the other side without millions of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and evictions, certainly that will contribute to a faster economic recovery. Sure, some white collar workers will be disincentivized from working... as long as the CARES act stays in effect. And you don't get unemployment if you quit, so no one will actively leave their jobs under this scheme.
Informing hundreds of thousands of people that a government enforced quarantine took away their job permanently isn't a good way to keep a government. If the government instead helps them stay on pay roll, life goes on
A far better plan would have been to quarantine the at risk population. Hard as that sounds, the current system is probably going to be much worse. Somewhere between a quarter and a half of working class adults aren't working right now, and that is going to make the depression look like childs play, because when those people stop paying their morgage, car payment, its going to ripple up the economy. You might be protected in IT at big CO this month but in 12 months when there is a 50% decline in revenue due to the lagging effects your going to get laid off too, which is going to just keep getting worse.
The issue is many people who have been laid off need money for _exactly_ those things. For tech workers the quarantine is a minor inconvenience at best. For those less fortunate, it is existential.
That magically coincided with the a huge government program to pay people only if they decline to work? That other countries without similar programs are not seeing?
The examples they give are insane. People were paid $15/hr to not work, so of course they were demanding $20/hr to work.
This program was the most bipartisan predictably bad program ever created, and almost certainly created more economic damage than the disease.
Yep, and for good reason: they absolutely should keep working (and spreading the disease around) if they have it, because they cannot afford not to. This is the consequence of having a society where there's no real social safety net to handle crises like this.
Personally, I'm a well-paid tech worker, but even for me, if I'm quarantined, my company policy is that I cannot come to work (nor can I work from home), and I must take either PTO or (if that's exhausted) medical leave of absence (without pay). Luckily, I'm single and frugal, live well below my means, and have lots of savings because I'm somewhat paranoid, so I can easily live for a few months without pay, but this just isn't true for most people, especially people without families who aren't overpaid tech workers like me. So I certainly cannot criticize people at the low end of the scale who avoid getting quarantined: they have to do this to survive. If we don't like this, then maybe we should have done a better job voting for leaders who would handle health crises better and set up social safety nets for things like this.
The federal government should have enacted stay at home measures.
By leaving it up to the states, it's been bungled and the covid outbreak is lasting longer and killing more people. This leads to stay at home needing extensions and a further drain on the economy.
Many jobs don't have sick days, they just have days you're not paid and, if the boss is nice, you still have a job afterwards. These workers cannot do the right thing without taking a hard hit.
This isn't the only snag those very sensible measures hit in our economic system. We really need to just hand individuals money a few more times and help businesses cover upkeep. The $1200 check early on was a great idea. No complex applications, no oversight of how banks handle loans, no unexpectedly unused piles of cash, no need to negotiate for months about what concerns should be covered and how. Money goes out, people spend it as needed, keep an eye on the budgets of critical things (hospitals, local governments) to plug holes if not enough of the cash flows to them. Maybe reinstate the paycheck protection program and make sure nobody worries about paying it back. Done. And it's not going to be done beyond a year, so there's little reason for landlords to jack up rent and vacuum the cash.
This is a short term crisis, so we just need to use a crutch until we can run again.
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.
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