We should have explicitly been paying people to stay home, but somehow the $1200 + the $600 unemployment bump became welfare payments, and morons were giving speeches about how they were incentivizing people to stay home. No shit.
Once we had things under control, we could loosen up quarantine, then when it got shitty again, tighten it up again and pay people to stay home. It would have goddamn paid for itself. If people could quarantine and know their livelihoods were secure, they wouldn't be so upset about it.
edit: this is a rehearsal for when the next coronavirus comes around that has an infection rate like covid-19 but a death rate like MURS. It's going to whip through the world like the plague.
Well fucking said but both times the stimulus was enacted we neglected large portions of the economy. If we do so again it wont be fixed and hello deep depression.
The problem is that one stimulus check cost $2 trillion dollars. Doing that every single month for an indefinite period of time is, quite expensive to put it mildly. And that’s not even taking into consideration that there’s a lot of people with monthly expenses in excess of $1200 per month.
I know these are large numbers, but the 159 million economic impact payments cost $267 billion [1]. This article [2] gives a pretty good overview of the $4T spent in total so far
> I know these are large numbers, but the 159 million economic impact payments cost $267 billion [1].
Great, but the bill cost $2T. Same with the recent one that’s been put on ice. Because there’s no such thing as a bill that only contains direct cash payments to citizens, they’re loaded up with pork and stuff that doesn’t even having anything to do with the pandemic.
Once we had things under control, we could loosen up quarantine, then when it got shitty again, tighten it up again and pay people to stay home. It would have goddamn paid for itself. If people could quarantine and know their livelihoods were secure, they wouldn't be so upset about it.
edit: this is a rehearsal for when the next coronavirus comes around that has an infection rate like covid-19 but a death rate like MURS. It's going to whip through the world like the plague.