This was proven to be very incorrect. Now, it’s probably true since so many people have given the government their information, but it for sure wasn’t at the start of the pandemic.
They didn’t have the information of employees of businesses?
Bank accounts for a lot of people don’t exist. Checks would have to be mailed in millions of cases and those checks would have to be cashed in a pandemic. As opposed to having 180 million applications or forms filled out with no infrastructure to get it done quickly, it went down to however many millions of people/businesses applied to PPP and that was still terrible at the beginning of the pandemic. There are horror stories from numerous people that are easy to find about how hard it was just to get the attention of a bank in the first place.
When a stimulus was given, untold millions of people signed up on the website and provided up-to-date information that could be used in the future fairly easily. You had to hit the lottery to get the site to load at the beginning and that was after they had enough infrastructure to handle it by then. Imagine that same scenario with no infrastructure. That was the beginning of the pandemic.
Thank god we had the business owners to make sure the govt knew their employees existed
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Yeah, the business owners or lackeys had to fill out the paperwork for 50 or 100 or whatever employees so that bank officers would just have to pore over each file themselves without any government intervention whatsoever. That money made it to the employees or it was fraud. What are you even talking about?
Jobs report blows away estimates. Futures tanking. Might be a rough day. ETA: well now futures immediately snapped back. Who the heck knows.
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God dammit they’re never going to cut rates huh
I know that everyone expected them to cut rates (including the Fed themselves), but it’s hard to see the argument for it. Is there any indication that the economy is weakening or demand is softening? I don’t see it.
The only legit case I have is “we really need Biden to win the election.”
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I mean I feel like the case for a rate cut being good news politically is that the immediate effect is STONKS STONKING, which they’ve already been doing.
If the economy is strong enough to not require a rate cut, I don’t know that that’s a political death blow for the party in power.
The only argument I’ve seen is that housing is unaffordable for the majority of Americans with the current price+rate combo, but demand is going to spike the second rates come down even a little bit which probably leads to housing being even more unaffordable.
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Yeah, housing was unaffordable at 0% rates because of a lack of houses. That hasn’t been fixed and until it is, is still problem.
Historically these are average rates we have now. Lowering rates should be a bearish sign in a normal world where stonks don’t moon every time a CEO says AI on an earnings call, but these aren’t normal times. Plus it’s an election year and I don’t recall seeing a bear market in a a presidential election year in a while.
I’m talking about your right wing talking point that the govt can’t figure out how to pay people because of incompetence. (Remember Obama cares website rollout!)
Zero means testing, 600 a week for everyone, people would figure out how to make sure they got paid.
The people who you claim that the govt would not of been able to pay are not even the same people who are regular hourly or salary employees.
That’s pretty hilarious to think that it’s a right wing talking point to say that there was no system in place to handle 180 million immediate requests or whatever during a pandemic where nearly every government office was shut down and completely unprepared for a disaster of the scale we faced. That’s just pure nonsense.
‘People would figure out how to make sure they got paid.’ Wat
I don’t even know what the other statement is talking about. Your only fair point is that the government has W-2 information of every W-2 worker, except the problem is that the pandemic began before 2018 taxes were due and the most recent info the IRS would have from most people would have been from 2017 taxes (addresses easily could have changed). The question for me isn’t about money, it’s about how you get it to the people. You haven’t made any compelling arguments so far that a one-to-one distribution would be done efficiently, cheaper, or faster than employers submitting on their workers’ behalfs. If you have compelling arguments, show your work.
It’s really easy to Monday Morning Quarterback this stuff, but at the time, there was zero infrastructure to handle what you’re talking about and for something that would have been maybe 2 percent of the needed infrastructure, it was a disaster but still ultimately effective albeit with delays and confusion. Plus, you’re acting like the pandemic couldn’t have been even worse than it was when it could and should have been a complete economy destroyer.
Your contention is the reason business owners should get the money is because the govt didn’t have everyone’s info.
If we would of done the unemployment benefit for everyone, $600 a week or whatever it was, and people were told you will get $600 a week but you have to get in touch with whatever system the govt set up, people would figure out how to give the govt their info.
I’m talking everybody though, business owners, billionaires, the unemployed, the people still working essential jobs for shitty wages, people who are retired, people who are on fixed incomes.
It would have been trivially easy to set something up to where people could share their info and get paid.
Stop acting like this is rocket science.
It apparently is ‘rocket science’ because the states were in charge of the unemployment systems used for this. There is no federal unemployment system. There are numerous states that are actively hostile to unemployment claims and it wouldn’t take you long to research why going through the unemployment systems of the states was a disaster. Florida, Texas, Nevada, and I’m sure many others made this extremely difficult, either due to hating having an unemployment system or no infrastructure that is often due to the former.
The decision to give the $600 through the states was done by the federal government, which quite arguably was a worse way to do it than going through the business owners for PPP. Your memory must be really short, but all the early phase of the pandemic stuff was horrific when trying to get it implemented. The federal government was using the states’ infrastructure to make it ‘easier’ and it didn’t.
Tons and tons and tons of people have no idea how to get this stuff and have no computer access, so leaving it on them to figure it out is not usually such a great idea. But you’re doing a spectacular job of creating additional red tape and ballooning costs without any justification or compelling reason to do so.
If something like this was needed today, I’m quite confident money could be gotten in the hands of the people very quickly after the stimulus system was set up. Based on how that originally rolled out, it absolutely would not have been gotten into hands quickly then.
When you come up with a good idea that could have been implemented with no infrastructure in a matter of weeks that would have been better than going through business owners and state unemployment offices, let me know. So far, you’re not making any compelling arguments to me at all.
PPP was built from scratch and is a lot more complicated than some flat UBI payout. How is that possibly easier than a website where anyone could apply for $600/wk and get a check in the mail or a direct deposit? It obviously isn’t.
Have to consider the lowest common denominator. What works best for the bottom quintile of technological literacy?
I’m going to go with giving them free money vs giving business owners free money. Its 2024. Nearly everyone is capable of filing out some simple online form.