I think you will be surprised that you can borrow your way out of it. what do you think is going to happen, humans are going to survive coronavirus only to be killed because the economy is no longer functioning? the market is there for the benefit of humans not the other way round.

Okay, fair points. Here are some of the issues I see with that. You have two options, borrow or print, right? If you borrow, you pay it back. If you print, you don't, but your citizens absorb a serious financial blow. So let's say we don't want to ruin the savings of Americans, so we borrow. Who lends? As of Dec. 2019, 74% of our debt was held by the public [0]. Odds are on that Americans fleeing to financial security would buy the better part of new debt issued, too.

So, you've kicked the can for 10 years; now it's time to pay back. Where do we get the money now? If you cancel it, you're destroying the retirements of millions of Americans, not just hurting some abstract entity of "the Market". Remember that a large number of people feel the effects of a market downturn, even if through a retirement account or pension plan.

So, to avoid retirees eating dog food, you now have to pay back. How do you propose to do this, given we already have a truly colossal $23.6 trillion in debt?

[0]: https://www.thebalance.com/who-owns-the-u-s-national-debt-33...

look you were able to find $2.4trillion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and your economy didn't collapse. that is 10% of your total national debt. this is not going to cost that much (and even if it does it's money better spent than on those wars).

now you are asking how do you pay it back? well you could start by taxing some of the ~600 billionaires that live there. the top eight richest billionaires own as much combined wealth as "half the human race".

so it's not like there isn't a pot of money there, and taking some of it certainly is not going to cause those people hardship. now you look at some of the major corporations and they're very low tax compared to revenue and profit and you have another pot of money that you can access again without causing too much hardship on the company.

the money is out there it's just very unfairly distributed.

I completely agree. It's incredible to me how many people in this and similar threads argue that we should just give up on isolation and allow many more millions to die. This pandemic is the perfect argument for UBI and universal healthcare and yet many are still unwilling to even entertain such ideas. Human life is worth saving and we have the means.

People do indeed die as a result of economic collapse.

yes and if that was the reason people were dying now then I would say fix the economy, but that's not what is happening. the economy can be fixed when we have ensured that the people who make that economy happen are safe.

if you were at war with a foreign country, and they were killing and injuring your population, you would fight back, the economy should be shattered, but you fight the war and when you win you rebuild. that's what this is, a war. it's just the enemy is not quite the same as it has been in the past.

> and we can't just borrow our way out of the economic fallout

Why not? The dollar is getting even stronger as the world rushes to our currency out of fear that their currency will have even more problems.

The problem is that we didn't pay down our debt in the supposedly "booming economy" of the last 3 years. Cutting taxes during a boom was a supremely stupid thing to do.

There are a few reasons for this, but the obvious one is that all the factory, worker, machinery, etc time that has been forcibly idled is gone, destroyed, everything it would've produced does not exist and no clever financial tricks can fix this. There's of course a bunch of more indirect effectis involving mass unemployment, the collapse of many businesses, the failure of demand for things, etc which are also going to be devastating. The US is likely to come out of this better than many countries - it looks like the deaths from this economic destruction are going to be co ncentrated in developing countries - but that's not much reassurance.

You could also say the booming economy was fueled by tax cuts. Personally I think the majority was from deregulation however the tax cuts did play a role

I mean, he's probably also capable of living in indefinite isolation at Xanadu 2, protected with his family from the virus. I'm content to take his counsel at face value on this one.

The real issue is that the US doesn't have a safety net for either scenario— whether dying of poverty or plague, you and your indiegogo page are pretty much on your own. Perhaps other countries have found it easier to stomach national shutdowns because they understood that it would be hard, but the people would ultimately be taken care of.

So how many lives are you willing to sacrifice for the economy? 0.7% of the US? That's two million people. That's a pretty optimistic number too. Maybe the 4% world-wide case fatality rate is closer to the true fatality rate. Remember that in Italy the case fatality rate is around 10%.

Choices have to be made. You can't save all lives and then have no economy to return to. It's a horrible choice, but it's the job of government to balance that. And yes, before you or anyone else says "what about your grandmother, your mother, father, etc", I get that. I also don't want to lose my job, my home, access to food, either.

The medical field is pushing their agenda. I don't mean that in a bad way. It's the Hippocratic oath...save all lives. If they save 100% of the population, they've done their job. They're not economists though. What people forget is that it's the job of our governmental leaders to balance on one hand the health and safety of the populace while on the other hand ensuring that there is a country left for them when they are healthy.

Choices are already being made. We're not all confined to our homes with the military distributing rations, even though that would probably be the most effective way of stopping the disease.

But it's a pandemic, not a war. No infrastructure will be lost in the next few months. The economy should be reasonably fine, once we can safely go out again.

It’s a false choice. Without a shutdown, do you think everyone will just start going back to restaurants? Will all businesses bring everyone back, filling up the elevators?

The purpose of shutdown is to drive absolute case numbers low enough for a new regime of contact tracing and testing to take over as the primary, far more granular means of fighting its spread.

You're taking it to the extreme and ignoring the whole point I made. As has been said by the president, you can't have the cure worse than the disease. I want to see people argue that point. I get the whole flattening of the curve.

A lot of people are pushing this tradeoff narrative and it's a completely false one. It's not like mass death has no economic consequences. If people are scared of a pandemic they're not going to just go back to their normal economic life, regardless of any cheerleading from government officials.

The way to get the economy back on track is to stop the virus as quickly as possible. The way to do that is to lock down hard for about six weeks, then open up but have lots of testing and contact tracing.

At least 895 people died of Covid-19 yesterday in the United States; I say 'at least' because poor test coverage guarantees the number is much higher.

895 annualized to a year is about 330,000, which puts it above all other causes of death in the US except cancer and heart disease, higher than:

   Accidents (unintentional injuries): 169,936
   Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 160,201
   Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 146,383
   Alzheimer’s disease: 121,404
   Diabetes: 83,564
   Influenza and Pneumonia: 55,672
   Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis: 50,633
   Intentional self-harm (suicide): 47,173

More alarmingly, the growth:

https://mackuba.eu/corona/#united_states.log

Can Covid-19 keep spreading and eventually kill 1/3 of a million people? Easily: one percent of the US population is 3.2 million.

I know you're not putting forward an all or nothing proposition. I also know that the economic impact of this pandemic will be enormous, more enormous than almost anyway can currently predict, whatever our 'lockdown level'.

I agree. To be honest - How long can we go on consuming for before we start to run out of food and other basic nessecities? What happens when food shortages start? 5 missed meals from a revolution, and that revolution will kill more people than the CoronaVirus ever would.

Not sure what you mean by insulated. Bill wants to live in a country that hasn't completely gone down the drain just like you or I; he can't buy what isn't made.

We are exactly going to borrow our way out. We always do.

I'm ok with a little financial uncertainty if it prevents people from dying.

He’s also old and if 2mn Americans die he could easily be one of them