And that's why government action to shut down businesses, should absolutely be coupled with action to protect workers salaries. In the UK, government is paying 80% of furloughed workers pay up to a certain amount, and there is relief on property taxes etc for businesses.

In my opinion the two (shutdown and relief) go hand in hand.

Some people think the richest country in the history of the world could figure something like this out, but those people don’t seem to understand how it became the richest country to begin with. The United States was built on laissez faire exploitation and that is not going to change overnight.

Nonsense. Laissez faire exploitation results in banana republics.

Laissez faire exploitation results in banana republics in the victim nations, and ultra wealthy first world countries in the predator nations.

I.e. the US and UK have gone ahead wonderfully; the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Zimbabwe, South Africa.. not so much

This is right, except the “predator nations” are really a ”predator class”. Working American have gotten a very raw deal. We have lost industry and jobs and wages galore to globalist projects. We may be the consenters of imperialism, but we are not the beneficiaries.

Here in NZ the govt hasn't sent people $1200, nor have they given large amounts of money to businesses to stay alive while we're all locked up.

What they have done is: - allowed companies who's income has dropped by 30% to claim $600/employee/week of salary support - negotiated with all the banks to allow mortgage holidays

Think of it as trickle up stimulus and trickle down rent subsidies to keep people connected to companies and as many companies as possible still viable

We're getting close to having Covid beat(only 5 new cases today, all from known sources), next week we slowly start dropping out of lockdown

Correction: "here in UK the taxpayer is covering 80% of furloughed workers pay". Governments have no money, they take it from taxpayers and redistribute. Moving money from a pocket to another does not fix the problem of decreasing resources if people don't work.

You can't simply "protect the salaries", government isn't some omnipotent god who simply needs to do some hand-waving to fix things. There isn't a fountain of wealth that the government is hiding from us! You can print more money (often bad), or make businesses pay salaries while taking no revenue (also bad)

I know that this is a shocking idea, but you can, in extraordinary circumstances, use a variety of government measures, including dipping into reservers to ensure that people don't starve and that businesses aren't forced to lay off people that they will need when businesses restart.

Yes, government isn't some omnipotent god but neither is it some helpless pathetic entity that can't sort things out at a time of extraordinary crisis.

> dipping into reservers

My assumption is that governments are taking on some sort of debt here.

When you control the mint, it's basically the same thing. Doubly so when its the USD and the rest of the world has exactly the same problem you do, so you hardly need to worry about the depreciation vs other currencies.

(Even if you hardly needed to before just by sheer size.)

That assumption is incorrect for sovereign currencies issuers (like the US, UK, Japan). They would just issue bonds, which is not at all like you or I taking out a loan.

Except for self employed people. Except for businesses that are supposedly just weeks away from running out of cash on a huge scale.

The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

> The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

Of course it doesn't. Governments all over the world aren't making decisions for the benefit of the economy right now, they're doing it to save the lives of their citizens.

>The idea you can simply shut down the economy at will and balance it with relief doesn't make economic sense.

Funny you say that because it seems to be no problem when it comes to bailing out corporate investors. Of course, near-zero federal interest rates didn’t make “economic sense” either, but yet here we are.

Bailing them out of what?

The term "bail out" is usually understood to mean replacing funds after the owner of them lost them through bad decision making. What's happening here isn't a conventional bailout. Governments have destroyed the businesses of private investors deliberately and explicitly - reductions in the damage aren't bail outs.

The virus would have shut them down anyway if they had stayed open and their employees and customers became ill. The bad decision making here is the lack of foresight to keep cash on hand to weather a storm like this, despite making record profits in the billions. We are all told if we don’t keep 6 months of cash on hand we are financially negligent. Large companies were begging for money within two weeks of shutdowns happening, after spending so much of their cash on stock buybacks to pump up stock prices.

Sweden shows that view is wrong.

These data show that retail, travel, and restaurants were all taking huge hits before lockdowns went in to wide effect: https://www.ft.com/content/d184fa0a-6904-11ea-800d-da70cff6e...

Bay area issued the first national stay at home order on March 13. By then demand had already dropped precipitously. If your restaurant is seeing 60% fewer bookings, are you going to keep as many wait staff? Are you going to order as much food? How is that going to impact your supplier? And their supplier?

On the flip side we have places like Smithfield food that stayed open and their workforce became infected. Smithfield alone has as many infected as the entire country of Sweden reported newly infected yesterday. These are problems of different orders of magnitutde. How does a factory stay open with 500 people infected at once?

Given how many people have mild symptoms and how age-dependent it is, it's entirely plausible that 500 infections would yield only a handful of employees to sick to work.

And yet Sweden still disproves your point. Businesses have stayed open, including restaurants and other such businesses, and yet Swedish companies are not evaporating due to their workforces being too sick to work. That's not even close to happening, is it?

Again, Sweden is not the US, they have not been hit nearly as hard. More people will die today in the US than have died total in all of Sweden. Sweden is not immune from the effects of Covid. They have imposed measures to limit the size of gatherings, have closed secondary schools and colleges, and have imposed restrictions on restaurants. Despite their looser restrictions they are still expecting to see the economy contract and have experienced record unemployment:

``` A record 36,800 people were handed their notice in March, more than 10 times the number from the same month last year.

The government has offered loans and guarantees and expects to increase expenditure by around 84 billion Swedish crowns ($8.35 billion) this year.

At the same time, the central bank has poured money into the financial system, offering 500 billion Swedish crowns in loans to companies via banks and boosting its purchases of securities by 300 billion crowns.

Banking group Swedbank said recently it expected the economy to contract 4% this year. ``` https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

Most self employed people are eligible to claim up to 80% of the average of their previously declared income up to 2.5K for the last 3 years. There are some notable gaps, but the vast majority are protected.

The U.K. government is also backing loans for businesses to limp on with, interest free for the first 6 months or year (I forget the specifics).

"There's nothing we can do" https://www.gov.uk/guidance/claim-a-grant-through-the-corona...

Fortunately many states are suspending unlawful detainer and eviction actions until the crisis is over and people can get back to work. They are similarly restricting foreclosure actions for impacted landlords who would otherwise use the rental income to pay their mortgages. This is also the humane thing to do because this crisis is no fault of the renters.

> many states are suspending unlawful detainer and eviction actions until the crisis is over and people can get back to work

So how does that work? Instead of right now, they'll get evicted and become homeless as soon as things open up, because they've been piling up rent with no income in the meantime? Would you find that comforting?

If everything just starts up with rent due and evictions happening to a significant population you just have a second wave of recession and a collapse of the rental market. I’d assume most people, particularly landlords and local government would want to avoid that.

> I’d assume most people, particularly landlords and local government would want to avoid that.

This seems like a “prisoner’s dilemma” situation. It’s rational for an individual landlord to evict a delinquent tenant and seek a new one. However, if everyone does this the entire market collapses. It’s better for everyone if the landlord takes a short term haircut to preserve the market.

Since cooperation is expected to break down between individuals, the government must step in to prevent collapse.

... or maybe this "landlord" is a parent who just rents out their old small house, and is now unable to make the rent or car payments

Then they do what everyone else does. Sell the asset and cut back on expenses.

Capital owners are not a special class of citizen. If you have assets and need cash, there is a way to convert one to the other. It's called a "market". You may have heard of it.

It seems that during recessions, asset-rich/cash-poor people, nominally Capitalists, turn into overnight socialists because making cuts to the ol' lifestyle is for the little people, not them.

How does that change things? I think small landlords are especially exposed to the dilemma because they have fewer resources at their disposal.

At least they have an asset they can use to survive and make those payments.

Why do you assume that would be the outcome? That is the cruelest, most pessimistic prediction that one could make. Come on, have a little faith in common sense and decency.

> Why do you assume that would be the outcome? That is the cruelest, most pessimistic prediction that one could make. Come on, have a little faith in common sense and decency.

Honestly, because its unlikely that most people will be able to share the burden of theses costs and we need only look at 2008 to see how a financial crisis reduced people to forced evictions (of people who even owned their homes, no less) because of delinquency.

Personally, I want to believe we could do more as individuals, as relying on the Government for solutions isn't going to work.

I'd prefer to enact a local/community based approach for this pandemic but I have serious doubts as to how it will take place or who would actually honor them when its clear so many businesses (even large corporations) are insolvent in the US. not to mention the level of wide-spread ignorance as seen with these quarantine protests taking place.

I'm starting to really wonder, especially as this can easily lead to a global depression if hasn't already, if we will have to have a debt jubilee given the severity of COVID.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/03/21/debt-jubi...

I'm not saying that will be for everyone, just that it is likely to be for many people, and those people may not be able to know if they're in that category until it's too late either. Obviously some landlords will be understanding and defer/waive payments long enough that people can repay, but my common sense says that, as cruel as it might be, what I described will also happen to a lot of people. I imagine in those cases they'll get served with a pay-your-rent-or-we'll-file-for-eviction notice as soon as that's legally possible. And unless some legal barrier is placed, I expect many landlords will evict as soon as they're able so that they can get their own income and pay their own bills.

I am having trouble understanding the landlord's perspective here. Say my tenant just missed 3 months of rent because they could not work during quarantine. Now, the economy reopens and they get their job back (yes, this is an assumption). Now they are able to pay rent but, because their job is not high-paying, they are unable to pay back the 3 months of debt. I can either waive the debt or evict and find a new tenant. But I lose the debt in either case, so why would I prefer to evict and have to suffer the hassle of finding a new tenant?

That legal barrier already exists - and the proscription is very broad. Why do you think we’ll just rip the bandage off instead of gradually phasing rent and mortgage payments back in?

Has there been a shortage of misgovernment recently that you think they'll take care of everyone, especially the poor?

There has been no suggestion that this debt will be cancelled. If a family can barely make ends meet in normal times, how will they pay back several months' rent arrears? And what will happen when they don't?

Why make these temporary suspensions at all then? Surely the people who need the government to prohibit them from evicting people during a pandemic who are unable to pay rent because of that pandemic, don’t inspire the most faith.

Because we still call them Land Lords

Why make these temporary suspensions at all then?

That's not enough if you're one of the 78% of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck and one of the 40% who can't cover a $400 emergency expense.

Most Americans are broke, it's just not really talked about.

> You and I can. Many of my friends have missed a rent or car payment, and may soon miss another. Most people cannot work from home.

Sure, and I'm very aware of my privilege in that sense. If people have the choice of getting the disease or missing rent payments that is a social failing we should all be ashamed of. I also don't mean to ignore the global perspective. The U.S. is materially wealthy enough that we could take care of people who need help as we get through this. Other nations don't necessarily have the resources.

In Canada everyone out of work gets a $2000 check almost right away and basically no questions asked. And we're definitely less wealthy than the US (even per capita). So very unclear to me why the US can't do the same

Unemployment right now is $1050 a week here in California ($450 state + $600 federal). Should be noted $2000 CAD is ~$1400 USD also.

Did you mean $1050 a month? $1050 a week seems like a lot.

Yes, weekly. The $600 from the fed is new in response to the pandemic.

The modern economy is a human invention. We can patch it with things like stimulus payments and eviction holds instead of blindly following it off a cliff into a worse health crisis. Sure we don't have infinite control over it, but we still have a lot.

How many fractional-people are willing to kill or injure for that payment, which should (but isn't, because this is America) be bailed out by the government responsible for the quarantine?

This is the statistical morality question that we're very bad at dealing with. Here, move this trolley switch lever. There's a 1/100 chance that doing so kills somebody. No, you can't tell whether it will, or even whether it did afterwards. Here's your cheque.

> which should (but isn't, because this is America) be bailed out by the government responsible for the quarantine

This makes me wonder if there might be some kind of eminent domain case to be made: If the government orders a business closed due to no fault of the owner/management, is that sufficiently similar to seizing the property that they owe some kind of remuneration for the action?

What happens in the event of other disasters, like hurricanes where the government can step in to close things? When there is an evacuation, is the government suddenly on the hook to remunerate? Running a business comes with risks, and one of those risks is having to shut down for some amount of time, for any reason. Should businesses that are not robust to this be bailed out?