(07-29-2020 03:01 PM)RiceLad15 Wrote: That still doesn't answer my question - I understand the point you're trying to make, but you didn't address whether or not you think there hasn't been a net loss of jobs due to the coronavirus, regardless of those who have decided to forgo returning to work because they find the wages are too low to compete with increased unemployment.
In the situation Tanq describes, it's pretty obviously a combination of the two. The worker won't come back to his/her old job because of the Nancy-bucks, and the employer can't afford to pay more because of economic turndown. I think most situations fall into that category.
This is the kind of distinction without a difference that academics love to make, but has no real relevance. Exactly WTF difference does it make whether jobs were lost directly to CV or to the $600/week Nancy-cash? This is the kind of thing that academics will be writing papers about to keep their "publish or perish" going, without dealing with anything that actually matters.
At the end of the day, I have felt for some time that the negative impacts of the economic shutdown will hurt more than the virus itself. Not making light of 150,000 deaths, that's a lot, but it's a lot because we are a country of 330 million people. It's one per 2,000. Putting that back in the perspective of my old home town of 8,000, that would be 4 deaths. I don't think we would have ever considered 4 deaths from anything to have been a pandemic.
I think Trump screwed up the response to CV-19. I think the main reason he screwed up is that the "experts" he listened to didn't have a clue either. In their defense, this was new and unknown, so nobody can be an expert about something that is unknown. But more significantly, those experts were all bureaucrats, not emergency responders, and their approach showed that very badly--from opposing the China travel ban, to the fiasco over testing, to the wildly overstated projections, to shutting everything down. A bureaucrat lets perfect be the enemy of good enough, and strives constantly to get more data and build more models rather than to solve the problem.
Here's how I have said for some time that I would have handled it. Shut everything down for a week or two at the start--no international flights to/from anywhere (except we are probably legally obligated to give US citizens the opportunity to return), shut down the exchanges for a week, try to stop it in its tracks. During that time, get all of the players together (by Zoom to set a proper example) to formulate a game plan. Who does the testing, where, with what tests? How do we get CDC and FDA off their asses to get tests approved and out there, using state, local, and private facilities to help? What seems to be working/not working in other countries? What critical supplies and infrastructure do we need and how to get it STAT? Get every member of the at-risk population insulated from any possible contact with the disease, to the maximum extent possible. Probably call for a one-month moratorium on rents, debt service, and other periodic contractual payments. At the end of the two weeks, allow reopening with masks and distancing. If you want to reopen, require masks. If you don't want masks, you can't reopen. Very simple.
Now if I had my way regarding policies, everybody would have already been getting a monthly prebate/prefund check, so the one-time checks would have been superfluous. And with
kurzarbeit employers would have been able to get significant subsidies to keep far more workers employed. And we would have had a trained, equipped, and ready National Guard to serve as what we really needed--an emergency response force.
A bureucratic paper-shuffling force was totally inadequate to our needs. And the so called, "Pandemic Response Roadmap," which was basically an instruction manual in how to shuffle papers, was pretty much useless to answer questions like, "Who does the testing? Where? With what tests?"