But is anyone seriously advocating keeping a $600/week around after the quarantine? If we can get out the other side without millions of bankruptcies, foreclosures, and evictions, certainly that will contribute to a faster economic recovery. Sure, some white collar workers will be disincentivized from working... as long as the CARES act stays in effect. And you don't get unemployment if you quit, so no one will actively leave their jobs under this scheme.
"The Emergency Money for the People Act, introduced by Reps. Tim Ryan and Ro Khanna, would give $2,000 a month to Americans over the age of 16 who make less than $130,000 a year."
"The payments would continue for at least six months and would last until unemployment falls to pre-coronavirus levels."
That would probably only cost a few trillion dollars. It'll take a decade to get back to pre-virus unemployment levels, and they know that. It took nearly a decade to get to those super low unemployment levels after the great recession, which was not nearly so bad as this situation.
Actually, the payments (because they would encourage marginally employable people to stay out of the labor force and thus out of the divisor for unemployment) would radically accelerate the (brief) return to pre-crisis unemployment. Of course, once they were withdrawn, the unemployment number would shoot back up, but that has no effect on the duration of the payments.
> That would probably only cost a few trillion dollars. It'll take a decade to get back to pre-virus unemployment levels, and they know that. It took nearly a decade to get to those super low unemployment levels after the great recession, which was not nearly so bad as this situation.
Well, it was a horrible way for the US to get to experiment with a wide-scale UBI system and create a viable model. One that was previously thought to be unfathomable, but honestly I'll take it.
And maybe because of my age, but 2008 was way worse than this. This doesn't seem like it will create waves of lost generations, for startes no one is being evicted from their Homes (yet) and no eviction systems are in place in many parts of the US.
> The bill comes as the IRS is about to begin mailing out checks approved by the recent COVID-19 relief package. Those will come printed with President Donald Trump's name on them, it was revealed this week.
Lets see what we learn from this, I'm personally cautiously optimistic on a Human level if this is the step being proposed. I'm just having a hard time internalizing how this is all being done while a clown like Trump is in office... I mean if this Andrew Yang, of course, maybe even Sanders, but Trump?!
