This refers to the letter that the law required to be sent to each recipient of a payment. Trump put his name on the letter, making it sound like he was responsible for the payment.
Yet you don’t seem worried that the billions we gave the airlines will somehow induce those layabouts in the corporate offices to quit flying and remain on the dole. It sure sounds like you’re blaming the employee. And yes, if you’re dependent on a never ending supply of poverty stricken applicants who have little choice other than working for your crappy wages or dying of starvation to induce people to work for you I feel like I’m not going out on a limb to call you a shitty employer.
Stimulus money needs to be tied to allowing “nonessential” businesses to reopen with some controls. Where will the money be spent?
If too many businesses fail, those jobs will be gone.
Unless you support a minimum wage of $50k to $60k per year, you might as well make that claim about every employer.
The first part is respectfully so off the wall that I don’t even know where to start. Delta is a company that needs to remain an ongoing concern. An employee can bail when the going gets rough and work for someone else.
If my business goes bankrupt, I go bankrupt. My employees can give me a handshake or a hug (well, they used to be able to do that) but their credit or their reputation is not on the line.
Contrast that with the airlines. Would you as a consumer like to have zero options for air travel until the creditors pick up the pieces and a new airline starts up? It is essential for the national economy that they stay in business, yet on one hand you want the janitor who cleans the TV screen at check-in to make $50k to $60k year and still complain that you have to pay more than $400 for that same company to get you across the entire country and back in the middle of a pandemic.
The hatred of capitalism and free markets is just astonishing. Bernie “only” wanted a $15/hr minimum wage. This stimulus has almost doubled that yet businesses are “shitty,” particularly mine, because that is not a wage we can pay without massively raising prices?
Further, it would be bad enough if that was the minimum wage, but it is more. If you are making $50k to $60k to sit at home, taking care of the kids, doing projects around the house, reading, etc., how much extra money do you need to start putting on work clothes, putting gas in your vehicle, listening to me bitch, etc. I would guess that it would probably take around $70k to $80k to get an employee back to work. That’s simply unsustainable without massive price increases.
If we were talking these numbers six months ago, I would bet that even on this leftist board, there would be unanimous agreement that this type of thinking has lost the plot. But not now.
Curious here. A depression doesn’t have a generally accepted, rigorous definition. It’s usually just thought of as an unusually deep and long recession. So what metric would you predict we’d see that is more than a recession, but that you actually believe will happen? 18% unemployment on 7/1/21? Full-year GDP reduction of 15% Something else?
My prediction, FWIW, is that we’ll see a recession that is shaped roughly like an reversed radical symbol (√). This is not the ‘Nike Swoosh’ shape everyone talks about, which would imply roughly linear growth from the bottom, but with a shallower slope than the decline. What I think we’ll see is a fairly rapid bounce back, probably in the latter half of this year, but only to a point. We won’t get back to where we were in January. We’ll bounce back, both in terms of GDP and employment somewhere between 40-60% of the way, and then very shallow, possibly intermittent growth, unless we see significant fiscal stimulus. I’d say 12% unemployment in December 2020, and then it doesn’t get much worse again from there.
I am horde-buying all the Monopoly games in the area, in anticipation that the government will make monopoly money legal tender. Their printing presses just can’t keep up.
After the CARES act, then the HEROES act, I’m guessing we’ll stop when we run out of clever acronyms.
…calls this bill “dead on arrival.”
Now there’s the strong signal from Trump that’ll get Mitch to take this bill up right away! 
The answer to that one is easy. If we’re gonna pay about as much money as the airlines are worth to keep them going, then the answer is, just nationalize them until the crisis is over, then sell them back to the private sector.
You’re correct - there’s no standard definition. More like “We know it when we see it.” I don’t have a specific set of metrics in mind, except to say that we’re getting closer to a point where a recovery would be much longer and more complicated than that of even a severe recession such as what we dealt with in 2007-9.
As was the case in 2008-9, the recovery will depend on the breadth and range of tools that we have in our toolkit, but more so on the competence and skill of people using them. It’s the latter that I’m concerned about here.
Keep in mind, were we already at the economic nadir now (and I absolutely reject that idea), some small percentage of small businesses would be lost. State and municipal governments would be faced with massive cuts in revenue and jobs (governments are a major employer everywhere). As of now, 2/3 of consumers aren’t itching to be near one another. So even if today, Paul Krugman, Larry Kudlow, and Jay Powell all somehow got in the same room and proclaimed the worst is now behind us, we’d still be dealing with a curve that looks a little more like a U than a V - at least for the next 3 to 6 months.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we’re anywhere near close to being done with the health crisis, and I don’t think the first wave of economic shock is nearly done. I remember that with the stock selloffs and investment banking crashes, it took several months before the job losses started gaining momentum - and IIRC the trend didn’t begin to reverse itself until early spring of 2009. And that was thanks to a government response that, actually beginning with Bush and Hank Pauslon and continuing with Obama and Geithner, did its job effectively by remaining focused on getting cash into the economy.
So far, say what one will about the state of partisanship and Trump, the response to date has followed a similar blueprint and arguably succeeded in the short-term, but the magnitude of this problem is far greater and much more complex. We will need more focus, and we will need focus not only on putting cash into people’s hands but also focus on the original problem itself, which is the public health response to the pandemic. We will also need the federal government to support states and local governments so that they can retain staff and rehire the ones who lost jobs. I question how long the bipartisanship will hold up and whether it will remain in place long enough to deal with this massive public health and economic problem we have. And I worry more and more about the competence of the administration and the desire of the Republican party to ignore their failures. It’s not an encouraging sign.
If things go better than expected, I agree that we’re looking at a check mark recovery. But if Trump and the GOP continue to cover their eyes and ears, this can easily deteriorate from being a short-term recession that lasts until late fall or early winter and become a 2 to 5-year (or longer) depression. By that, I mean persistent double digit unemployment nationwide, with some states and metro areas facing persistent unemployment between 15 and 25 percent. This current situation is almost certainly going to wipe out the marginal gains that were made at the bottom half of the socioeconomic spectrum since 2009, and it will exacerbate inequality - that’s even if the economy trends up beginning today. That seems highly unlikely, which is why I think we’re a lot closer to a tipping point than people realize. It’ll be damn ugly if that happens, too.
It’s okay as long as there’s no inflationary pressure, which there isn’t right now. If it were just printing money and if there was little or no taxation, we’d have a problem (Weimar Germany). If we’re printing money and there’s little or no production of goods or services or anything of economic value, or if we were asking government and gov’t contractors to build things without having any real way to repay those costs, we’d have a serious problem. We’re not at that point yet.
It’s possible to cause inflation by flooding the market with extra money during an economic upswing. In this scenario, people who don’t necessarily need stimulus would have extra money to spend, which would in turn create a surge in consumption (good in the short-term) but consumption would outstrip demand and quickly lead to a rise in prices (bad in the longer term and really, really bad for those on limited income).
A bigger worry I have now is that we’re borrowing against the future, and the future of things like SS and medicare just got bleaker. If you’re my age (mid 40s) or a little older (in your 50s), retirement is likely gonna be more complicated.
It’s hard to make generalizations because the calculation depends on which state you are in, how many employees you have and at what pay grades, sometimes what industry you are in, and a host of other factors. You typically just have to crunch the numbers to estimate what your particular marginal cost of layoffs are. In general you don’t want people getting unemployment when they aren’t entitled. I’d imagine there must be cases where it’s more trouble than it’s worth to contest the former employee’s claim. How prevalent those cases are after running the numbers, I have no real clue as I’m not in an HR line of work.
But that’s “just” a framing problem. Absolutely “more money + free time” vs “less money + limited free time” is an obvious decision. “more money in the short term + free time in the short term + decent chance of starving/homeless a few months later” vs “less money + limited free time + still eating later because you still have a modest-but-steady paycheck” is not at all an obvious decision. If you are a manager/boss/leader/whatever of any sort, is it not basically one of the points of leadership to be able to deliver a convincing answer when a subordinate asks “Why should I listen to you?” by framing the decision in a way that favors your business interests?
I’ll admit I’m coming at this from my own perspective and level of risk aversion. For all I know I am substantially more risk averse than an average person, which is why the whole concept of passing up a steady paycheck just for the potential opportunity to get a few months of outsized checks seems quite risky. Hence why having UI supports be somewhat more generous in the short-term that working a job, for some segment of the population, invokes an attitude of “eh, small potatoes relative to the overall set of problems we have right now.”
Not returning to work is not a legal choice for employees, I mean, regarding unemployment benefits. If offered their old job back, and they refuse, the employer must report them and the employee is not eligible for unemployment benefits. In order to be eligible for the federal contribution, the worker must be receiving state UI. If they refuse to return to work they are no longer eligible for state UI and are subsequently ineligible for the federal contribution. It seems you’re implying that an employee will get the federal contribution of $600 until July 31st regardless, as in they can turn down a reasonable offer of work (I’d say getting your old job back is reasonable), and still receive the $600. That is not true.
Eligibility has changed. You do not have to qualify for state unemployment to qualify for the $600. The states do have to implement though.
There will be another stimulus. The Democrat proposal has various provisions about the election. Republicans want liability protection for businesses. Like I said a stimulus will pass but not in its current form.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.foxnews.com/media/-coronavirus-stimulus-high-likelihood.amp
How do you go about doing that? My daughter is on unemployment and only has to apply through the state to get the state and federal money.
I agree that something will pass. I’ve got to imagine that with the way the first (CARES) act is being perceived (largely a giveaway to big business) coupled with the popularity of their initiatives, the Democrats should have an advantage in pursuing their policy aims (aid to states and the post office, longer UI, another cash handout, and protecting elections) relative to Republican policy aims (protect big business more!) But I don’t underestimate Democrats’ ability to screw up the messaging or give away much more than they need to.
Also, ‘Democrat’ is a noun, not an adjective. You meant ‘Democratic proposal’ above.
All of this “stimulus” is like trying to dry your hair before you get out of the shower. Instead of sending it to people to spend on takeout meals, spend it on finding a cure. The longer it takes to find a solution the more damage will be done, both in terms of lives and economic collapse.
It’s not a democratic proposal. It’s a proposal by the Democratic Party. It’s not my fault they choose an adjective for their party name. It will always make for awkward syntax. They should have kept the Democratic Republican name.
What on earth? Surely you know the difference between “a democratic proposal” and “a Democratic proposal.” Nobody but nobody is confused about this.
I think the term “stimulus” is a bit of a misnomer. It’s more of a “life preserver.” The idea isn’t that giving people money will stimulate the economy but more that they are in desperate need of cash to even stay afloat to begin with. That’s why Kamala and Bernie recently teamed up to propose that Congress give every adult $2,000 a month until the pandemic crisis is over.