Anyone telling you that the choice between staying closed or economic recovery is a binary one is either lying or being lied to. Germany gave up to 12 months payroll relief to every employer so that when it’s safe to resume economic activity, no one there will have lost their job because of the quarantine. Swamping the state unemployment systems and giving insufficient aid to small businesses was a choice. Something to remember when we choose in November.
Please share widely!
Does Germany also have UBI?
Not sure if they also sent checks to everyone. I interpreted the policy as paying idled businesses to keep their payroll going.
“We don’t want the cure to be worse than the disease”. I see Trump rallies to re-open states and hear the participants say this will result in a “government take over of our lives”. Fox News people are worrying that “once Americans get used to the government giving them everything, we’re on the path to Venezuela.
These people are getting their talking points from those individuals who are afraid that maybe now, maybe finally, Dorothy is willing to pay attention to that man behind the curtain and discover who has been in control all along. Now that she’s lived through the Great Recession only twelve years ago, now that she’s aware that most Americans don’t have savings to cover a $1,000 emergency, and now that she sees that since our health care is connected to our jobs – we are losing both, maybe she will finally lose faith in the status quo.
She was offered eight years of “hope” but little changed and now the promise to make America great again has brought us to our knees.
It’s not working. It’s beyond fixing, It needs to be replaced.
You are right, it does not have to be this way.
A lot of time was spent between 2008 and 2020 planning for the next Wall Street bailout…. a lot of thought went into that. Helping actual people? Not so much.
The local delegation voted 100% for the bailout. This will circle back to bite them. Maybe not this year, but it will happen. There will be stories of people hurt and people sacrificing and they will want to know why did you help the powerful, but not me? And we will stand with them.
I mean I think the issue with the last bailout is that it was not big enough and did not go to enough of the right people. So the response should be voting for a bigger bailout and insisting enough if it goes to small businesses and individuals. They should also take out the means testing BS. Some Republicans are outflanking them on the left calling for direct cash handouts to small business and individuals and they should seize on their framing rather than saying some people “deserve” help more than others.
Everybody should be helped. No exceptions. I think Trump is choosing big business over small business while some on the left want big business to fail. We should want no business to fail and no individual to fail. All Americans are too worthy to fail. All big businesses employ ordinary people. I’m just as outraged thet the airlines wasted their reserves on CEO pay, but bailing them out helps my working class students (with one exception of color) who work at the airport and still have to go to work during this shutdown to feed their families. Letting the airlines fail would fall on their shoulders, not the CEOs. Even if it shouldn’t.
Should Obama and Biden have allowed the Big Three to fail? That was Romney’s position and it was wrong. Both politically and morally. We pay people not to work now so they can go back to work later. The German way.
I did “vote for a bigger bailout” in 2018. Many economists recommended exactly that.
Unfortunately the President didn’t listen, preferring to try to appease the right wing that had publicly vowed to make him fail above all else.
I think he didn’t believe those threats or thought they were rhetorical bluster. Perhaps he confused appeasement with the kind of compromise that, between reasonable factions, greases the gears of government.
Appeasement didn’t work—it never does—and the slow pace of the recovery, while acceptable to Wall Street, set the stage for wage stagnation and the rise of Donald Trump.
I mention this from fear that we have not learned anything from that and are posed for another round of appeasement followed by failure and Trump-style backlash..
“The bailout” is a rather generic term and your reference to a slide between 2008 and 2020 makes unclear to what, precisely, you refer.
If you are referring to the 2008 bailout, (if memory serves) William Delahunt and Stephen Lynch first voted against the bailout along with many Democrats not local. Then the DOW plunged nearly 800 points in a day, and spooked as they were at the spector of complete economic meltdown, upon re-introduction the ‘bailout’ passed rather handily.
This time around, there are, ostensibly, direct payments to individuals and munificent unemployment benefits. But it looks like the administration is making a complete cock-up of the actual, well, administration of the law.
I mean the 2020 CARES act, which passed 96-0 in the Senate and with a single “nay” in the House.. It provided $450 billion in seed money for the Federal Reserve to inject in excess of $4 trillion in liquidity to Wall Street. This is how wealth is redistributed in the 21st century.
Individuals are getting checks too, and I generally assume that anything that passes by such wide margins is probably a good idea.
True, but the disparity in aid is enormous. It amounts to robbing average Americans to maintain trust fund wealth.
I invite you to say more about $450 B in “seed money” turns into $4 T in “liquidity”, and how that in turn constitutes redistributing wealth.
I’m not saying I challenge you, I’m saying that I don’t follow the chain from each step to the next in your argument.
You conclude by saying that average Americans are being “robbed” in order increase trust fund wealth. I don’t understand how an average American loses anything here.
The $450 billion was appropriated by Congress. You can read up on exactly how the Fed is expected to turn that into 4+ trillion in liquidity, but that’s all being done with public money. All of the reporting I have seen assumes this wealth is going to large corporations. It’s not being shared equally. And it’s only being shared at all, to the extent that trickle down actually happens.
These are all policy decisions being made in our name, with our money.
In other words, you don’t know.
These funds go directly to the national debt (just as the $2 T cost of the GOP tax giveaway went directly to the national debt). Nobody has to pay for it, it just means that the national debt goes from $23.68 T to about $24.13 T. In fact, it is only through PAYING OFF that national debt that any wealth is actually transferred to the wealthy (because the overwhelming majority of T-Bill holders are wealthy). So it is incorrect to assert that $0.45 T is taking wealth from anybody.
There are several ways that $0.5 T can turn into $4 T — I don’t see how any of those alternatives can accurately be characterized as spending “public money”. For example, there are multipliers in the money supply — none of those take money away from anybody.
At least part of the policy decisions being made are to put a non-trivial cash payment in the pocket of nearly every taxpayer. Another part is to add $600/week on top every unemployment check. Both of those most certainly help average people. The servers, bartenders, and other hourly workers that I know most certainly welcome and appreciate these.
In my opinion, unfounded cynicism only makes an already difficult situation worse.
It’s actually pretty simple… Society has limited resources. When Congress gives disproportionately to Wall Street, that wealth comes from the rest of us (where else would it come from?). This is paid for in a number of ways. But you have ignored the most obvious, which is that taxpayers will be paying interest on this debt forever.
And while you say the bailouts cost us nothing, that’s certainly not how Congress sees it. They have been very hesitant to bail out average people. Yesterday they provided bailout funding for small businesses that is expected to last all of TWO DAYS.
I know people with no income… people burning through savings.. people who may lose their small business. If this is free money, then why is Congress being so stingy with them? Why is the $1,200 payment only a one-time thing? As others on here have pointed-out, UBI would be a fair way to spread the wealth equally. But even if UBI were to happen, this is peanuts compared with what we are giving to the super-wealthy.
We always talk about the disparity in wealth and how terrible it is. That doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from policies favoring the interests of large corporations and the very wealthy. Bloomberg isn’t wealthy because he just works really hard (as he said in one debate). He’s wealthy because public policy concentrates wealth in the hands of the few.
Never forget — we’re bailing out corporations with OUR money. That’s not just bad policy, it’s bad politics… Just like Progressives, Tea Party Republicans oppose “corporate socialism.” We should be building bridges with them. We should be peeling-off Rust Belt Trump voters, who have been betrayed by corporate America for so many years. Instead we’re just going along with whatever Trump and his Wall Street backers want.
@: It’s actually pretty simple
To paraphrase Mr. Einstein — things should be as simple as possible, and not more so.
I share your opinion that our government should be doing less for the ultra-wealthy and more for everybody else.
It’s your attempt to connect macro-economic policy directly to specific programs that I think is mistaken. During the interminable period while the GOP forced various “austerity” measures, there was in fact a huge transfer from the 99% to the very wealthy just as you suggest.
That’s because Congress was slashing the total monetary value of goods and services provided to the general public in order to “balance” the federal budget and pay down the national debt.
That isn’t happening right now. These several COVID responses are NOT being accompanied by forced reductions in government spending. They are, in fact, examples of exactly appropriate deficit spending in the classic Keynesian tradition.
I did not say that any of this was “free money”. No nation has infinite wealth. The mistake I think you’re making is to tie those constraints to closely to individual bank accounts.
I’ve seen multiple exchanges about finding ways to make the $1,200 payments recur in some way, especially as the impact of all this drags out. I think we might well find increased support across the political spectrum for both UBI and also universal health care as we go through this.
I whole-heartedly agree with your overall stance towards these programs. I challenge some of these specific assertions you make.
Most of all, I think it’s important to do everything we can to remain optimistic and avoid cynicism.
I’m not following your disagreement, but I’m glad we share some common ground. With every Democrat voting for this, I think outrage is a very appropriate response.
@I’m not following your disagreement:
I fear we’re talking past each other.
I don’t get your outrage. Since, as you say, every Democrat is voting for this, perhaps you might ask yourself whether you might be missing something.
I’m reminded of the old aphorism:
Complaint: You’re out of step with the rest of the troop
Response: I’m in step, the rest of the troop is wrong.
Dylan Ratigan has suggested that progressive leaders just don’t understand macroeconomics…. which could be true, although I don’t think there’s anything complicated about giving 4.5 trillion to big corporations while there’s actual people hurting out there.
When it comes to fundamentally changing the system, progressives are impotent They know the media is controlled by corporations that will weaponize COVID against any “no” votes. They’re hoping to get goodwill from the party that will somehow translate into more achievable goals. But they know there is no way they can challenge Washington Consensus economics, root-and-branch. Refusing to bail out Wall Street would have done exactly that — shake the system to its very core. There would have been a massive reshuffling of wealth and a fundamental change in how Wall Street functions…. difficult change that NEEDS to happen.
Progressives will cite the wealth disparity at election time, but they are not offering anything that would do more than to barely slow the accumulation at the top. We can incrementally add services and corporate oversight for eternity, but it will never catch up with the Jeff Bezos’ of the world. I support Bernie and Warren, but we need to be real about what’s happening here.
I think there is a difference between being in power and watering down your own agenda for the sake of attracting a few symbolic Republican votes to call it “bipartisan”. We know President Obama and the conservative members of the Democratic caucus bought into that fallacy, egged on by a media duped into thinking it true. That’s 2009.
We are talking about 2020. The reality now is we have a dangerously incompetent President who’s barely contained by his public health team into making terrible policy. We have a Majority Leader who time after time puts his own power as a hand maiden for corporate interests ahead of the needs of his country, his party, and even the Senate itself.
Arrayed against this a caucus full of AOC’s
and Andrew Yangs would have a hard time passing its perfect relief package-let alone the actual caucus which has a mix of deficit hawks (dumb they may be, but their votes count and need to be mollified) and swing district representatives with their own priorities. I think Pelosi is doing the best she can with the hand she’s been dealt. Schumer is another story, I agree he’s a weak leader too often taken advantage of by Moscow Mitch. This latest relief bill wasn’t great. I give you that. The next one will be bigger and bolder and Mitch will have less leverage every time.
@couves:
More briefly, “I’ve already made up my mind, don’t confuse me with the facts.”
@Tom
That’s a oddly pugilistic response. What facts did I not respond to?
@jconway
Progressives were in a tough position, but they should have at least put up a fight. By sitting on their hands, they guarantee that the overton window will remain in the corporatist center-right. They should have at least tried to spark public outrage.
You haven’t responded to any of the basic facts of macro economics that I’ve cite, other than an oblique reference to leaders who “just don’t understand macroeconomics”.
When I’ve asked you to be specific and concrete, you’ve answered with hand-waving and evasion (“you can read up on exactly how …”).
Sometimes it’s satisfying to flame and I guess we’re all entitled to do that from time to time. You’ve strung together a sequence of assertions are opaque in this context (“the media is controlled by corporations that will weaponize COVID against any “no” votes.”) as if adding more unsupported assertions strengthens your case. I’m as hostile towards the media as anybody here, and I just don’t understand what you mean. At. All. What is “weaponizing COVID against any ‘no’ votes”?
The most important fact that you aren’t responding to is that real and concrete benefits are starting to be distributed to people who need them in ways that I haven’t seen in my sixty-odd years on this planet.
If you don’t think that extra $600/week means anything, then I suggest you either don’t know anybody who struggles to break even each month or you just don’t care.
I think these are desperate times. If the price of providing an extra thousand in spendable cash to somebody who desperately needs it is that we have to burn ten thousand dollars in paper, I say go for it.
Tom, your salient critique of my argument was that “nobody has to pay for” the Wall Street bailout. I let you walk that back without comment, Then you follow that up with a logical fallacy, which I respond to with a thoughtful comment. Now you’re resorting to insults and bluster.
Like I said, we’re talking past each other.
They have put up a fight and forced McConnell to cave. Now if the roles were reversed Mitch and the Freedom Caucus would say no to anything a Democratic president proposed and let thousands die and millions lose their jobs and homes to win a midterm. I’m glad our side is not doing that. I’m glad we’re governing.
I’m glad our party is consistently putting people over politics. So they are extracting as many pro-worker concessions they can get and playing hardball with Moscow Mitch. At the end of the day, they can take credit for the good in the stimulus and fault the GOP and President for putting in the giveaways and not funding PPP, PPE, and SBA sufficiently.
Dems are pushing a $4T package that would actually solve problems. It’s up to the GOP to play ball with us. If they don’t, we throw them out in November.
For your reading pleasure
“Anyone telling you that the choice between staying closed or economic recovery is a binary one is either lying or being lied to.”
This is incorrect. This is wishful thinking. DW, the German television network just reported last night that there is now a resurgence of the curve in Germany.
So, no, not so much.
This is FALSE INFORMATION.
Sometimes you have to choose.
People are not going to go back to work without knowing they are safe.
As is so often the case, reality is more nuanced than this.
Staying open or closed is a data-driven decision that is exquisitely sensitive to hyper-local context.
When America and the world were first discovering the intensity and spread of the HIV virus (then called “AIDS”), American government and society reacted in a similarly binary way. At that early stage, there were two mechanisms for transmitting HIV — intravenous drug use and receptive anal sex. Those two mechanisms accounted for virtually ALL HIV cases for at least a decade (I haven’t kept up with the data since then). Scientists, including scientists at the CDC, knew that. It was immediately obvious from data published by the CDC even then.
The obvious data-driven recommendation was simple: avoid those two behaviors. That obvious data-driven recommendation did not fit the political narrative of the culture. In particular, the reference to a specific sexual practice was much too graphic. Because of its prevalence among homosexual males, America’s pervasive homophobia of the time made it impossible to talk about the actual sexual practice that was dangerous.
The public narrative therefore became a similar dichotomy to what this narrative offers about opening and closing: “Safe sex” or no sex. Even the left wing embraced hysterical lies, such as the pervasive myth that HIV could be transmitted through oral sex. Newspapers of the time recounted anecdotes of teenage girls who began practicing anal sex because they thought it was safer than vaginal penetration. Even the left wing embraced the idea that the only way to avoid AIDS was to limit sexual activity to partners in “a committed long-term relationship”. Balderdash. The reality was simple: 1. Use condoms or avoid sex with IV drug users, and 2. Use condoms during anal sex.
The actual truth about how to avoid AIDS (“Use a condom when practicing anal sex”) was replaced by a narrative that exploited fear and hysteria about a rightfully dreaded disease to advance a very specific social, religious, and political agenda.
Of COURSE people are not going to go back to work without knowing they are safe. That does NOT lead to a binary choice between keeping an entire nation open or closed.
It instead leads to the absolute necessity of:
1. Making widespread and accurate testing available, reliable, and free (to the subject).
2..Making accurate data about LOCAL infection rates freely available, along with tools to access and analyze it.
3. Providing up-t0-date essentially real-time information, analogous to weather reports, about where outbreaks are happening and how intense they are — a “COVID weather report”. It is no harder to do for COVID than for weather.
4. Providing universal access to effective health care
5. Providing universal relief from COVID-related closings and economic impact
That’s what has to be done.
The repugnant political agenda driving Mitch McConnell and the GOP right now is that this pandemic is an opportunity to hurt Democratic strength (by literally killing and bankrupting Democratic states) and help GOP strength. COVID immediately hits densely-crowded populations first and most intensely. That means it hits BLUE states first and hardest. The first wave of deaths disproportionately hits the poor, minority, and aged. populations — the same populations that are disproportionately Democratic. The same dynamic is true for the economic impact of the pandemic — the first and hardest-hit businesses will be small, urban, minority-owned, and disproportionately Democratic. In red states, this pandemic will primarily hit the populations already demonized by GOP bigotry — immigrants, minorities, and the poor.
Forcing a nationwide closing and lockdown advances this repugnant GOP agenda. It pits sparsely-populated mostly-white red-state populations against densely populated minority-majority blue state populations. It divides us. It divides us in the same way that America’s repugnant response to AIDS served to pit heterosexual men and women against their homosexual brothers and sisters.
We should instead demand the above 5 steps, so that we can keep our attention properly focused on minimizing the spread of COVID and on maximizing our ability to treat its victims.
I never did understand why there was a fear of AIDS or why it was treated as an epidemic. I recall knowing from the beginning that if you didn’t want to get it you just had to refrain from at most three very specific activities. It also blows my mind that to this day there is a ban on gay men donating blood, which I assume would be tested for AIDS regardless of who donated.