Cut checks into the hands of people now. Bailout small and medium businesses with one string attached: keep payroll going. It’s asinine that neither of these provisions were included in the last stimulus. We will need a second round and it should bail out small and medium businesses (especially restaurants) and offer employer incentives like the ones given to the airlines (keep everyone on payroll). Now the unemployment line will be back logged and it’ll be harder for people to be rehired by the time the economy gets started again. June at the earliest. That’s another 2-3 months without pay for a lot of Americans. So we should cut checks to everyone, not just people making $75k or less. We should suspend all interest payments, forgive student debt (this will cost zero dollars and put billions back in the hands of ordinary citizens), and look at paying people’s rent for 2-3 months. Time to bailout the rest of us. Bailout 2.0 needs to happen and Joe Biden should be out there (virtually if need be) championing it. Also DPA to make as many N95’s as possible. We are reacting to a Depression/Second World War crisis without the governmental mobilization needed to win.
Cities and towns like Somerville that impose a ban on evictions for landlords must also impose an analogous ban on mortgage collections.
If a property owner is unable to force the payment of rent, then that property be protected from the consequences of being unable to make the mortgage payment funded by that rent. Each consumer needs to be protected from adverse impacts on their credit rating if they are unable to make payments because of this forced shutdown of the economy.
What’s happening right now strikes me as showboating.
I disagree that people with high income need a check. But they should get unemployment, and the state should fix its unemployment web site ASAP. A couple of days ago it had crashed.
It’s not a Depression yet, but could become one, if the economy is not quickly rebooted. Dems might want to get ahead of the ball and advocate for economic rescue measures to businesses – come November, the virus may be vanquished, and the economy will be election topic #1.
Trump is already leading Biden 60%-40% in polls as better for restarting economy. We can’t cede this to Republicans. Democrats need a practical plan to restart the economy, in addition to advocating for bigger unemployment payments.
People think Trump is better on the economy – really?
Right now yes, I have a feeling when we inevitably hit double digit employment and the market continues to tank this will change. That said, it does not help that Democrats are still stuck in a neoliberal framework where we have to design complex hard to access relief programs and means test everything.
Republicans like Romney and Hawley are already outflanking us on the left with their proposals for no strings attached temporary universal basic income. Yang was right about this, at least as an emergency measure. At least until the crisis passed. New York State has already nationalized it’s hospitals, which were in danger of shutting down due to unprofitability.
I do not see why Biden and Co. can’t push some kind of Lend Lease program for hospitals whereby a hospital in danger of going in the red can agree to public ownership. Just like FDR “lent” destroyers for “leases” on UK bases, the federal government can “lend” funding to hospitals in exchange for “leasing” them for use in a future national system. Could be a great way to make electoral inroads into rural states, like a TVA for rural health care.
It’s not a bailout, it’s an upward transfer of wealth. More will be done for average folks, but only because the oligarchs fear a total breakdown of social order. What they should fear is the growing powder keg of economic populism that this country has become.. Once we get that “wealth tax” in place, the oligarchs will be living like the rest of us.