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
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.
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!
You're right, I don't get it. Its much better to have these people who are suffering under an economic collapse outside of their control go to work sick, and spread the virus before finally losing their jobs and homes and go without food instead of getting money and then using that money to buy necessities and in turn stimulate the economy. In addition the people who's children relied on school lunches should be glad they are not getting money to feed them so as to keep it out of the hands of big industry. Thank you for illuminating my ignorance I was blind to it before.
This is a pretty mask-off (excuse the pun) moment in your argument. So to protect small businesses we shouldn't have paid people at all or closed down at any point and we'd have more than a million dead Americans but at least workers would still be as expendable?
You don't get to call us "essential workers" and treat us like shit. This is the first time in my living memory McDonald's and co raised their starting wages. Line cooks were the most impacted and it was the most dangerous job last year. You want that to be worse, for small businesses to survive?
I can reincorporate "Drekk Design Studio", the line cook can't re-enter his mortal coil. We should have paid everyone every month of the pandemic and enforced these public health measures like Germany (1 in 10 infected vs the US 1 in 3).
If you live paycheck to paycheck, your choices are to stay home and starve when you run out of money, or to continue with life while making sure you wash your hands a lot and don't touch your face.
Sounds to me like the choice is pretty obvious. I suppose the government could step up and provide to replace your paycheck while you stay at home with your kids, but honestly, this isn't that bad of a virus to warrant that.
People that are high risk should stay home. Everyone else should wash their hands and avoid their face and avoid crowds.
> The streets should be deserted right now.
You're probably overreacting. And let's hope all the health care workers decide that work is more important than staying home.
One thing I don't understand about this line of thinking is how do you expect sick people from working? Sure, not everyone will die but a significant portion of the population will get infected and need at the very least to stay home for a week or two. How is that situation better than where we're at now?
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.
People living paycheck-to-paycheck with no savings will go to work while sick, hurt themselves and infect all their customers. Solving the simple issue of their income is a prerequisite for tackling the public health issues; and if you can't implement lockdowns and other restrictions because you haven't solved the financial logistics of how people will pay for their food, then the result will be dead people.
What you (Edit: not _you_ in particular, but what a country does by making self-isolation opt-in) are doing here is shifting the blame of who is responsible.
If the government says that you must stay home for public health, then it is reasonable to expect that the government assists in covering costs associated with that.
As soon as the government says "You can go to work if you feel it best, the choice is up to you" a non-trivial amount of people are going to be forced to go back to work, whether they feel like they should or not. Because "you're allowed to, staying home was your choice", these people will not be compensated for making the public-safety choice.
I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to be in a situation where the person who is making my lunch (or stocking grocery shelves, etc) should have stayed home, knows they should have stayed home, but couldn't afford to stay home because "it's not mandatory".
The people not producing goods weren’t doing so out of laziness or some bureaucratic snafu. They weren’t producing goods because there was a pandemic and getting physically near others was dangerous.
If you think those furloughed workers shouldn’t have gotten any money sue it would be “good” for the long term system, then might I suggest as a modest proposal that you simply toss them into a meat grinder? Very simple and removes the people spending too much money from the economy
Government need to reasonable, still have the lockdown while we know the virus is not that dangerous ? paying people extra unemployment money to not working ?
The situation is pretty complex. People at the top decided that only these essential workers deserved to make a living and put many people out of a job. So you have a big supply of recently unemployed people ready to replace any of these essential workers if they started organizing for more pay or what have you. Unemployment insurance is nice, but not everyone was working before this happened, so that's a lot of people left out from getting some kind of government assistance. Also, they decided to close down schools, so now you have a lot of >16 year old kids with laid off parents who are probably now trying to get any kind of job so that they can help themselves or their family. I think the government did not go hardline enough about supporting everyone, so they've created a sick situation where people are begging to go back to work during a pandemic instead of enjoying their once in a lifetime forced vacation.
Re 1) Why would my friends loose all of their hours if their employers don't shut down? My friends are young enough that they would likely recover quickly from the virus if they got it.
Re 2) There is no way the police has the manpower to enforce a shutdown like that, even with help from the national guard. There would be riots. And where does food even come from in this hypathetical situation?
Not everyone can afford to stay home with minor illness. Not everyone will be employed if they stay home and can't "cover" their days off with measly 40 hrs a year of paid time for such purpose ( if they have any paid time at all).
This issue existed long before COVID. COVID is spreading partially due to this issue. Many people have no choice but work to avoid homelessness and/or hunger.
People working many hourly jobs net less than $1,000 per month and cannot afford to take unpaid time off. So they go to work and spread the virus. Providing them and others with enough money to at least cover their most dire bills reduces that need to go to work sick. If money is not provided to these people, the odds that they are soon homeless if their work closes down is very real.
~40% of America cannot afford a $400 emergency, all of those people are at real risk of hunger and homelessness.
Giving everyone cash allows the country the freedom to implement programs that run a real chance of preventing the spread. It also goes a long way towards preventing societal chaos as people without savings and suddenly no income are now provided a way to continue living and feeding their families.
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