The "Re-Opening" the Economy Thread

[TD_washingtonredskins]

2 hours ago, BatteredFanSyndrome said:

Out of curiousity, how low is the pay?  Considering the current benefits of receiving unemployment, If I'm making $50K/yr or less - I'd prefer to stay home and collect.  Of course I understand that unemployment is a dumpster fire and it's possible they haven't received the payments yet, but they will have to pay up what's been missed.

$15 per hour. Which, yes, I think comes in well under $50K annually. 

1 hour ago, Larry said:

 

. . . since we've made sure that they either get back to work, or starve.  

 

Give them the choice of doing what's good for the country, without being evicted/repossessed/bankrupt, and see what they want.  

 

I thought those measures were in place. But, even so, just hitting pause isn't the same as continuing to make money, build a savings, etc. 

[EmirOfShmo]

11 minutes ago, TD_washingtonredskins said:

$15 per hour. Which, yes, I think comes in well under $50K annually. 

In Va, if you're turned down for unemployment you still might qualify for the $600/wk Fed PUA. That's $31k/yr & $15/hr. The PUA is scheduled to run through January 31, 2021. Va unemployment is 12-26 weeks. 

[NoCalMike]

The problem with framing this as "Stay at home" vs. "Open everything back up" is that it is under the presumption that stay at home orders were being enacted & followed across the country in the first place.   If the masses were taking this seriously then I am willing to bet the curve flattening would have been a lot more effective by now.  So currently what we are seeing are the results of what happens when some states decide to do one thing based on medical/health recommendations and other states don't.   Let's ignore the who is wrong/right philosophically part of the discussion for a bit and just talk statistics of which has been more effective medical-wise and which option has been more effective in getting the country closer to going back to "normal" 

Edited May 18, 2020 by NoCalMike

[JCB]

Agree with all of that, Mike. Not to mention the fact that the best "plan" for reopening would have involved national coordination of testing and contact tracing beginning in March.

[The Evil Genius]

11 minutes ago, NoCalMike said:

The problem with framing this as "Stay at home" vs. "Open everything back up" is that it is under the presumption that stay at home orders were being enacted & followed across the country in the first place.   If the masses were taking this seriously then I am willing to bet the curve flattening would have been a lot more effective by now.  So currently what we are seeing are the results of what happens when some states decide to do one thing based on medical/health recommendations and other states don't.   Let's ignore the who is wrong/write philosophically part of the discussion for a bit and just talk statistics of which has been more effective medical-wise and which option has been more effective in getting the country closer to going back to "normal" 

 

Try comparing California's covid19 mortality rate of close to 4% vs the entire US mortality rate of 6%. 

 

Hard not to see that shutting down the state helped vs whatever slow response 40+ other states had. 

 

 

[Renegade7]

 

 

[TradeTheBeal!]

So, it’s reopening day in VA.  Couple of anecdotal points...

 

Theres palpable optimism in Central Va.  Car biz is slightly better than expected.  Many, many restaurants are doing strong takeout.  Local online retail stuff is fairly robust.  IOW, customers are spending.

 

Speaking of restaurants, Northam deciding to drop Phase 1 on an 85 degree Friday is a bold play.  Opening up the patios. Lots of gray area in the regulations...some joints were throwing up tents and fold-ups in their parking lots on 72 hours notice to try and meet the specs.  Pretty sure the state just threw up their hands and said “have at it”.

 

Fairfax and Richmond begged out for two weeks.  Wisely.

 

Northam could’ve hedged his bet and waited a few days...gonna be 65 and raining on Wednesday.  Giving all involved a few more days to prep.  Go big next weekend.

 

Money talks.  State needs revenue.

 

 

 

Edited May 15, 2020 by TryTheBeal!

[visionary]

****!

 

 

[EmirOfShmo]

5 minutes ago, TryTheBeal! said:

So, it’s reopening day in VA.  Couple of anecdotal points...

 

Theres palpable optimism in Central Va.  Car biz is slightly better than expected.  Many, many restaurants are doing strong takeout.  Local online retail stuff is fairly robust.  IOW, customers are spending.

 

Speaking of restaurants, Northam deciding to drop Phase 1 on an 85 degree Friday is a bold play.  Opening up the patios. Lots of gray area in the regulations...some joints were throwing up tents and fold-ups in their parking lots on 72 hours notice to try and meet the specs.  Pretty sure the state just threw up their hands and said “have at it”.

 

Fairfax and Richmond begged out for two weeks.  Wisely.

 

Northam could’ve hedged his bet and waited a few day...gonna be 65 and raining on Wednesday.  Given all involved a few more days to prep.  Go big next weekend.

 

Money talks.  State needs revenue.

 

 

 

My friends restaurant here in RVA has set a new sales record every weekend day since April 4th. 

[Mr. Sinister]

We truly do not care whether we (collectively) live or die. Might just be time to scrap the human race altogether 

[TradeTheBeal!]

5 minutes ago, EmirOfShmo said:

My friends restaurant here in RVA has set a new sales record every weekend day since April 4th. 

 

I have a couple restaurant friends that have gone full online catering.  They sell out Friday by 6:00PM Thursday.  They don’t even answer the phone.

 

 

[CousinsCowgirl84]

Overall I’m glad there is a place I can go to remind myself not to do anything stupid. Really would like to try to go out to a restaurant, enjoy a nice mixed drink, leave a fat tip, and enjoy the ocean air... but I mean, that’s a lot of people.... and no masks... 

[Mooka]

42 minutes ago, Mr. Sinister said:

We truly do not care whether we (collectively) live or die. Might just be time to scrap the human race altogether 

 

We don't even care in this country when someone walks into an elementary school and starts murdering everyone.

[skinsmarydu]

19 hours ago, visionary said:

 

Why respond? Let em run amok and kill themselves. 

[Die Hard]

1 hour ago, Mr. Sinister said:

We truly do not care whether we (collectively) live or die. Might just be time to scrap the human race altogether 

 

That’s why nature programmed variety. It ensures survival of the species.

 

So let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. Most are compliant.

Edited May 15, 2020 by Die Hard

[visionary]

 

 

 

 

 

[visionary]

 

[Hersh]

2 hours ago, Mr. Sinister said:

We truly do not care whether we (collectively) live or die. Might just be time to scrap the human race altogether 

 

The human race will be the reason the human race disappears. Then the rest of nature will thrive again. 

[Mr. Sinister]

6 minutes ago, Hersh said:

 

The human race will be the reason the human race disappears. Then the rest of nature will thrive again. 

 

I guess I just need to chill for awhile. I have nothing good to say right now. Nothing. I wish nothing but the absolute worst for those parasites.

[skinsmarydu]

I was just about to post something similar. 

Anything heard from @CrypticVillain?

I'm trying keep track of the crew. 

[China]

CAN THE PANDEMIC SAVE AMERICA’S CRUMBLING NATIONAL PARKS?

 

At the Taylorsville MetroPark in southwest Ohio, parking is in short supply. The trail that runs parallel to the Great Miami River north of Dayton is busy with cyclists, joggers and dog walkers out in the spring sunshine. The trail is dotted with signs urging users to stay 6 feet apart to help reduce the transmission of the coronavirus.

 

It’s become a familiar scene ever since coronavirus-fueled stay-at-home orders left Ohioans and millions of Americans homebound last month. With people allowed to leave the house only for essential shopping, to work or for exercise, parks and trails quickly became crucial to maintaining a semblance of normality for millions. Now, with many parks closed after struggling to ensure social distancing among visitors, the recognition of their value is leading to a chorus calling for greater financial assistance to rescue America’s crumbling parks.

 

States such as Colorado, home to four national parks and 23 million acres of public land, saw record numbers descend on its public spaces in March as people fled to the outdoors for exercise and a break from home. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park saw 30,000 visitors a day — up 20 percent from the previous year — in the period before it closed on March 24.

 

But the National Park Service (NPS), the organization that runs the country’s 419 national parks and sites, is struggling with a $12 billion funding shortfall. A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress in March, the Great American Outdoors Act, proposes to try to fix that, and could release $6.5 billion of the NPS budget shortfall.

 

Click on the link for the full article

[Mr. Sinister]

32 minutes ago, skinsmarydu said:

I was just about to post something similar. 

Anything heard from @CrypticVillain?

I'm trying keep track of the crew. 

 

Haven't heard anything here. The only person on ES I know on a first name/outside contact basis is Ricky Tan.

[Renegade7]

2 hours ago, Hersh said:

 

The human race will be the reason the human race disappears. Then the rest of nature will thrive again. 

 

Doubt it, it's not easy to kill a species that can live on all 7 continents year round.

 

Nature will do it if it does it, even a 99% culling with enough time would just take us back to where we were in BC time, zero won't be easy unless we intentionally try (which we'd probably use nature to do if we did).

[RemoveSnyder]

https://eand.co/the-american-economy-is-imploding-and-america-is-too-e998d3cfb1d9

The American Economy is Imploding — and America is, Too

How Coronavirus is Finishing the Job of American Collapse

- umair haque

These numbers mean that, since the the employment to population ratio has crashed to just fifty percent. That means: just half of the American population is now employed.

These are numbers so catastrophic they make economists like me shudder. They have no modern parallel whatsoever. They point to an emerging depression — call it the Coronavirus Depression — that’s probably going to be greater and worse than the Great Depression. That’s because even the Great Depression had a New Deal. America, instead, has Donald Trump.

Coronavirus — or more accurately — the lack of response to it will probably finish off what’s left of the American economy. America will end up a country with permanently lower levels of all the following: employment, income, savings, trust, happiness, assets, and so forth. America was already in the process of becoming something very much like a poor country, with the failed politics of one, too — but Coronavirus will accelerate and finalize America’s grim transformation into poverty, paralysis, and collapse.

I know that sounds improbable, maybe even absurd, to some. I don’t much like writing in such terms myself. So let me spell out just how and why.

These shocking, unreal unemployment numbers are like the shockwave of a great tsunami, or the tremors that signal an earthquake spiking off the Richter scale. They’re a beginning, something like a plume of smoke to be followed by a deafening explosion.

Why? The logic of depression is simple — Keynes discovered it a century ago. It involves two things: money, and confidence. An economy undergoes a shock — a stock market crash, a natural calamity, or, in this case, a pandemic. I lose my job. I stop spending. So do my neighbours. Our local businesses — who usually exist on the margin, with little in reserve — begin to go shutter their doors, as a small but crucial number of customers stays away. That causes yet another wave of unemployment, which causes yet another wave of bankruptcy, and so on. Until, at last, the vicious spiral has engulfed the whole economy.

By that point, five transformations have happened — that usually spell ruin for a generation or more.

First, because waves of businesses have closed, the nature of unemployment changes: it goes from a short term challenge to find work, to a long term lack of jobs at all. You can already see that happening in America. Many of the jobs lost now aren’t coming back — ever. Those businesses, small and medium sized ones, are gone for good. Their owners will spend years in liquidation — if they’re lucky. How many will ever start businesses again?

Bang! The few jobs that are left are “low-income service jobs” offered by mega-monopolies, which means delivering groceries and driving cars and walking pets. But they don’t provide stable incomes, benefits, guarantees, much less raises, career paths, and so on But when economy’s labour force…goes nowhere…what future can it really have?

That brings me to the second transformation depressions wreak. Economies grow permanently poorer. Yes, as in “forever.” That’s already happening in America, too. yesterday’s if not great but somewhat decent jobs were already being substituted away by the new, gruesome “gigs” that modern-day American techno-capital offers — driving an Uber, delivering an Instacart, selling a pallet on Amazon — but Coronavirus has accelerated that transition, massively. Megacorporations aren’t going to magically hire huge numbers of people once they’ve found out they can make do with permanently lowers levels of hiring. But lower levels of hiring across the economy mean that workers have less bargaining power. Bang! Incomes fall — the share of the economy going to working people craters. What’s the net result? Society grows poorer.

What happens to poorer societies? They’re left in a kind of terrible paradox, which is my third transformation: they can’t afford the very things they need to survive most. Why is it that the average American is the only person in the rich world by now who votes against their own healthcare, retirement, education, childcare, and so on? Because they can’t afford it. 80% of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck before Coronavirus. Who can afford to pay an extra 5% or 10% in taxes for decent social systems? Nobody, really, except the already rich — who don’t need them. Hence, the famous paradox of the American Idiot: people who vote against their self-interest. It’s not their fault, really: they have no choice. They can’t afford to vote for things like public healthcare.

America was already becoming too poor a society to have functioning public goods, like healthcare or retirement for all. Coronavirus is going to seal that fate. America will be poor now — far too poor to ever really make the transition to having decent public goods. Think of that full half of the American population who’s now not employed. How exactly are they going to afford the higher taxes it takes to have a European or Canadian style social contract? They struggled to before — and after Coronavirus, it’s going to be flatly impossible.

That’s another of depression’s vicious cycles: it makes nations poor, and they end up being unable to afford decent being modern societies at all, places in which people support one another with expansive social contracts, in the end — because when people can barely even afford self-preservation, how can they support anyone else’s quest for a better life, too?

That brings me to my fourth transformation: as a result of depression, an economy’s whole structure tends to change. As groups, classes, segments. Think of America not so long ago. It’s structure resembled a bell curve. A broad middle class, a small number of rich, and a larger — but still small — number of poor. And then around 2010, for the first time, America’s middle class became a minority. The gentle bell curve was on its way to becoming something more like a U-shape: a caste society of very rich, and everyone else: the imploded middle and the old working class who became the left-behinds, all of whom became the new poor, that 80% living paycheck to paycheck.

Coronavirus will accelerate that change, too. America’s already dying middle and working class will finally crumble and coalesce into one vast permanent underclass. America will have effectively a massive pool of something very much like easily, algorithmically exploited technofeudal neoserfs — people who’ve reverted to servitude to make a living, only their overseer is an app. Those “low income service jobs” are economists’ jargon for “people becoming servants again.” To whom? To a kakistocracy, if you like — a class that’s the opposite of aristocrats, who were supposed, at least, to the best and brightest. America’s ruling class is now visibly made of predators, the kinds of men who put men in cages, or addict a whole society to painkillers, just to make more money they’ll never spend.

That brings me to my fifth and final transformation. What happens to societies with imploded structures? The gentle bell curve of a modern society — a broad middle — is so crucial because it underpins and anchors democracy. Democracy is a luxury. It takes time, money, effort. To be a democratic society. A society of servants is rarely a truly democratic one — think historically for a moment — for the simple reason that, well, servants are too busy being exploited around the clock to really engage with the res publica, the body politic. So when a society’s structure implodes from a gentle bell curve into a U-shape — it’s usually accompanied by political implosion, too. Into authoritarianism, theocracy, fascism, or any number of tyrannies.

Modern history’s full of examples. In the Arab world, in Latin America, or take the canonical example, Russia. As the Soviet Union failed, what emerged wasn’t a wise and gentle democracy — but Putin’s Neo-authoritarian dystopia. But that was inevitable — because Russia never really evolved much the past the U-shape of inequality, unable to develop the bell curve of moderation that democracy requires.

America’s social structure collapsing foretold the rise of Trumpism. If you understood what the implosion of the middle class meant in 2010, you could have predicted Trumpism a mile out — I did. And what I see today is…more, only worse. Societies growing poorer can’t just not afford functioning social systems — they can’t afford democracy, either. America was on that trajectory — but Coronavirus is like adding a rocket engine to it. How democratic a nation do you think America will be when a full half of its population is now not in employment? You can already see that Americans hover between despising each other, and being totally indifferent to each other. When self-preservation is an everyday struggle, that’s the result. But the struggle for American self-preservation is about to get a whole lot harder, more intense, more painful, more tragic. And that spells the end of America’s time as a democracy, too, most likely.

Furthermore, because in America, lockdown is being lifted prematurely — before the infection rate has even peaked — the emerging depression is going to linger. If the pandemic lasts another three months, six months, year — how long will the depression last? The answer is: every day of pandemic is going to add up to weeks, maybe months, of depression, as people lose confidence in visiting shops, spending money, or hiring anyone else. Just as in any relationship, once confidence is lost throughout an economy — it doesn’t magically spring back the next day: it takes far, far longer to regain confidence than it does to destroy it, and it’s much, much more expensive, too.

This is what a dying economy looks like. Yes, a dying economy is a nation plunging into poverty — like America. But what people often fail to understand is that it’s much more than that, too. A dying economy takes systems and institutions and public goods with it. A dying economy takes a functioning society with it — it’s gentle bell curve, it’s norms of trust and acceptance and coexistence and tolerance. And a dying economy, ultimately, takes a sane, decent, sensible politics with it — the basic elements of democracy — too.

[Sacks 'n' Stuff]

Seems a little hyperbolic