That's a failure of imagination.
Looking at the non-spending costs of lost productivity, opportunity costs, etc., it’s a staggering number.
I suppose it’s impossible to know if we’re striking the right balance at the moment, but it’ll be interesting to see the analysis after it’s over.
I’m not saying our response is wrong by the way. But it’s a jaw dropping number. It’s a building a moon base, or universal healthcare for a decade, or a mission to mars, or high speed trains up and down America’s coasts number.
I mean yes, of course it is. But does it do anything to stare and point at it with your jaw dropped? What does the alternate timeline look like where the government had no need to distribute significant amounts of money to employees and businesses?
Early antibody studies have shown that prevalence is much, much higher than positive case count would indicate.
Potentially 50x - 85x more cases than positive tests based on the Santa Clara / Stanford study.
In Boston last week they mass tested at the Pine St homeless shelter and found 50% of them positive and 100% of those were asymptomatic.
If when the dust settles the reality is that the curve wasn’t flattened at all, most everyone was already exposed, and the true IFR was more like 0.25%.... then we flushed $6 trillion down the toilet.
Isn't that like going all in with two aces in texas hold'em poker, and saying "If when the dust settles the reality is that the other guy had a 7 and a 2, and the board was a 3, 4, 5, 6 and a J, then I flushed all my stack down the toilet"? You make the decisions based on the information you have at the time. If you're forced to make a probabilistic call based on what you know then, your decision doesn't become wrong based on the future outcome.
And if you look at New York City for example, can you imagine any scenario where when the dust settles it turns out that we didn't have to do any of that social distancing and stimulus injecting?
Are you making the case that one of the possibilities in this forest of unknowns is that maybe we didn't have to do anything? How does that match up with what we're seeing happening in say, NYC?
The Fed has spent at least $2 trillion dollars on this already. Probably closer to $6 trillion by the time we are done. It is an unimaginably large cost to shut things down relative to any possible benefit.