And you shouldn’t give Trump a pass. My point is Trump is a corrupt moron who loves being flattered by important people. Those people are going to do great with Trump flailing about doing whatever the last person who kissed his ass tells him to do.
All of that may be true, but just because the outbreak would have been awful under Hillary doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been better than what we have now.
Under President Hillary we have a much more competent response to the virus but it’s unlikely she stops the economy from tanking because Americans are stupid and value their freedom to party over other peoples lives so nothing short of martial law would have stopped this.
And then instead of Mnuchin sending trillions to the corporations we get Jamie Dimon…sending trillions to the corporations. And the little guy gets screwed either way, just like under Obama.
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Surprised it hasn’t been posted. Pelosi finally laid out the upcoming house bill. Sounds way better than I expected tbh, obv won’t get passed as is though.
Allocates $150 billion to supporting hospitals, local health centers and government-funded medical programs, with an additional $80 billion in low-interest loans to hospitals.
Eliminates cost-sharing for coronavirus treatments and vaccines for all patients, including the uninsured.
Addresses broader health care concerns that Democrats have pushed for months, including increasing subsidies on the individual market and creating new incentives for states to expand Medicaid.
Provides child care assistance to health care workers and emergency personnel.
Offers individual Americans $1,500 in direct deposits, and up to $7,500 for a family of five. The benefit would be available to anyone with an individual taxpayer identification number, retirees and unemployed individuals.
Would temporarily provide $600 per week to unemployed workers affected by the coronavirus. Self-employed workers, Americans whose contracts were cancelled, and new entrants to the job market would also be eligible.
Expands paid sick leave and family medical leave, as well as gives more money to food-safety benefits.
Provides $500 billion in grants and interest-free loans to small businesses.
Creates a $200 billion stabilization fund for states and $15 billion for local governments through the Community Development Block Grant program. The legislation also authorizes the Federal Reserve to purchase state and local government bonds.
Pumps nearly $60 billion into schools and universities, with $50 billion directly provided to states for school funding and nearly $10 billion to higher education institutions.
Dedicates $4 billion in grant funding to help states with upcoming elections and nationally mandates 15 days of early voting and no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail, including mailing a ballot to all registered voters in an emergency.
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Could do with something like that in the UK - still nothing here for self employed.
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I’m glad the dems are still upsetting nazis from time to time. USA#1!
I wish they could pass emergency UBI without anything added to it. All the other stuff they can argue about all they want but families are literally running out of money already. A ton of Americans were already in crisis mode before this happened.
Trump and the GOP could of solidified a win in Nov if they said “Look, we don’t care about the economy. Humans are more important than the economy. We are passing emergency UBI of 4K per adult per month for the next 90 days. We will reassess where we are with the corona virus after 90 days. Please, stay in and take care of yourselves. Your country cares about you.”
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Is the metric we are using for determining the amount how much I need to live on?
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Part of the reason I’m choosing an amount that is more than what most people make per month right now is so we can get away from this mindset of scarcity. We have the money, the biggest lie is that we don’t.
It would cost 2.5 trillion… If we are serious about slowing this thing down and not wrecking the economy this is the types of measures we need.
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The point is to stimulate the economy, you do that better if you give people more money.
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Writing pro-Trump propaganda to own Hillary Clinton for some reason.
Stocks are up so I guess we can lock this thread
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So here’s the thing… 4k per month is for sure high (particularly per adult) but there are literally millions of Americans whose monthly bills are in the 8-10k for a household range who are very suddenly without pay. They have basically nothing saved and their retirement accounts just dropped dramatically.
When they start missing payments it’s going to cause a financial chain reaction which is going to ripple up. The people who lent them money ALSO borrowed the money, and the people who lent the lenders money most likely did as well. And none of these people were positioned for losses of this magnitude because the consumers they lent the money to had excellent credit.
The system can easily handle a few of these good credit risks having problems every now and then, but the volume of them here is going to absolutely crush any expectation.
So injecting too much money into the system is a lot less risky than injecting too little basically. This isn’t at all about what people could theoretically live on, or the morality of spending exactly what you make on a 200-300k a year household income. The issue is what happens when a shit load of these people all default at the same time.
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I really like this package. Problem is they will cave and pass a slightly less bad version of the GOP bill.
We live in a shithole country where we pay hundreds/thousands of dollars per month on “insurance” that we then have to pay another few thousand dollars to take advantage of, so anecdotes about getting by on $1000 a month are meaningless.
It’s not a myth when it comes to businesses, companies aren’t just going to keep paying people while they’re not bringing in income.
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Yeah no offense but you’re the one who is incorrect here. In the modern economy supply is effectively infinite (in the same way that if water is more than 5 feet over your head it doesn’t really matter) which means that demand drives everything. Basically if there are people willing to pay for something it simply springs into existence. That requires people to consume.
Where things have gone wrong is that we’ve refused to open up consumption of services to people below a certain level of society, despite the fact that we absolutely could. Out of excessive fear of inflation we’ve refused to increase the pay for workers at the bottom of the pyramid (them not having enough money to pay more than x for food or y for rent holds down inflation theoretically) while we’ve not encouraged anyone above the bottom tier of society to save (only to consume, because that’s what drives the economy).
We should have instead increased pay to the bottom so they could share in luxuries/save and encouraged the middle and upper income people to save more money (thus opening up some more scarce stuff to people closer to the bottom).
The issue isn’t consumption (although we need to increase prices for environmentally destructive consumption so that businesses have the incentive to figure out environmentally friendly stuff for us to consume) so much as it’s the savings rate. We simply haven’t been preparing for something bad to happen at all.
A great example of the kind of consumption we could (and should!) do more of is my wife going to get her hair done for 200 goddamn dollars. Her hair stylists are middle-upper middle class people with fairly active instagram accounts. The carbon footprint of their business is probably pretty minimal as most of what they are selling is labor. These kinds of services can employ lots and lots of people at very good wages, and people who provide these sorts of things can afford to buy these sorts of things… so everything continues to work well. Luxury services strangely are absolutely wonderful for the world and the economy at large because they generate human happiness, cost very little environmentally, and provide good jobs for people who absolutely couldn’t do what you or I do for a living.
The other thing about supply being infinite is it means that all arguments about ‘how do we pay for it’ are horseshit. We pay for it by investing heavily in our people and then taxing them. That’s how we pay for healthcare, greening the economy, and literally everything else. We need to raise tax rates while simultaneously having the governments primary priority be increasing the overall wealth/income of the median household (easiest way to do this is to first uplift everyone in poverty out of poverty asap… they COULD be demanding stuff that created jobs/wealth for the economy but instead are barely consuming anything but cheap essentials).
The scarcity is artifical. There is no shortage of anything we could dream of wanting. The only really scarce things left for humanity on planet earth are physical resources, but we’ve made those artificially cheap (food is cheap, plastic goods are cheap, energy is cheap, etc) while making stuff that’s effectively infinite expensive (the time of skilled professionals, education, healthcare). It’s all backwards and fucked up.
The one good thing I can see coming out of this whole mess is that we can maybe rebuild a lot of this from the ground up afterward. It’s long overdue.
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I’m prepping for right-wing family/friends/co-workers to come at me with the “but the Dems want all this Green New Deal stuff as part of the bill.” How much truth is there to that statement? My assumption is 0% and that it’s a complete right-wing lie. Am I correct?
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They are attaching environmental stuff to the airline bailout… but that’s all that I’m aware of.
This is not a valid argument though. The GOP is very very good at getting what they want attached to must pass legislation. For instance in the GOP bill they’ve basically tried to block any healthcare service the helps poor people from accessing coronavirus funding, and they aren’t helping poor people almost at all with any of the money.
Their whole argument is just incredibly cynically hypocritical.
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America’s middle and upper middle classes are full of complete idiots who have no savings and feel absolutely entitled to a lifestyle they cannot afford. They are completely unaware of their vulnerability until a negative event happens, but strangely protected by the aggregate magnitude of their economic power. So they never actually suffer for their stupidity because that would blow up the whole damn game.
Basically, this:
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If available supply is equal to 100x what all humans could consume if that’s literally all they did all day long supply is effectively infinite. This has nothing whatsoever to do with physics.
As to ‘it springs into existence’ what really happens mechanically is that some person like me sees that there is demand for the product/service and figures out the logistics of making it happen. People like me would have you believe that it takes resources, but the resources it takes are in ample supply. There are plenty of raw materials and there would be plenty of human expertise if we would stop wasting so many humans in the interests of maintaining our current hierarchy.
The real bottleneck in the current economy is human talent hours… and we’ve engineered our whole social system to intentionally waste as many of our fellow humans as possible for ridiculously arbitrary reasons. The way we rank people’s merit/talent is hopelessly broken and the way we fit people into roles is the single biggest factor in preventing us from advancing as a species.
The sooner we, as a species, realize that scarcity ended 20-30 years ago and goods and services are only constrained by our own lack of imagination, the better. The reason why society doesn’t want to do that is that the only way they are able to source humans willing to do the unpleasant tasks is with coercive false scarcity where they have to do those tasks or end up living under a bridge. In the future we’ll solve this by just having unpleasant jobs pay really goddamn well. There’s absolutely no reason being a truck driver doesn’t pay 100-200k. There’s absolutely no reason why being a nurses aide doesn’t pay 100k, and being a nurse doesn’t pay almost exactly the same. There’s no reason why college should cost anything, and there’s no reason why college educated jobs should pay better than jobs that require less education but suck significantly more.
Human suffering is a commodity that should be in fairly short supply and very expensive. Instead we’ve built an economy on having huge supplies of it available.
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