Each of those businesses employed people who relied on those jobs to survive as well as the owners of the businesses themselves. The building owners require those businesses to be running and pay leases and rent so they can pay their employees and so them and their families can have income. Every permanently closed business affects everyone that relies on that business and it's not always obvious how many people rely even on a small mom n pop business existing.

If landlords don't have to pay for themselves, furloughed staff, or rent, keeping a business in suspension seems much more doable.

The usual advice for people who are not on the breadline is to have at least a few months of reserves to spare. It seems we expect our national economies and business owners to operate less prudently than individual households, because we "can't afford" a more robust system.

In fact we're more than capable of creating our own recessions/depressions without a threat. And while there seems to be some legitimate concern for the current victims of this recession/depression, it's interesting how little there was during previous downturns.

This isn't strictly a logical question. We're told that we shouldn't let a crisis go to waste. Our opponents certainly don't.

It helps people not starving, yes, but this is not really compensating. And ridiculous, when you consider "wrestling" was considered "system-relevant". But all the small buisnesses not.

If you don't personally collapse then that helps extend the life of a small independently owned business.

By being employed, and by employers being in business. If we had a better system, we'd still have serious issues, and probably far less capacity to react due to the economic drag those kind of systems have.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/22/she-got-a-paycheck-protectio...

The measure’s improved $600-a-week payments, which run through July, aim to boost that wage replacement rate to 100% for the average worker."

In other words, this is a very temporary measure due to the current crisis, and those on unemployment will be making far less than they would by working in a few months. A short-term duct tape measure to stop the bleeding isn't security.

Not sure what the point of this oft-repeated fact is, if not to gas light the trauma out there.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/23/business/econ...

The $1200 is a 'stimulus' payment going to everyone.

Paying businesses to keep people on payroll may have been a better policy (as the disruption gets longer that changes).

Seems the payment starts decreasing for people earning something like the 70th percentile?

(It's hard to figure because it differs for filing status)

From first principles, why should the small furniture business be worried about collapse? Little work is getting done, so no employees need to get paid. They don't need to be purchasing more inventory. The remaining true expenses are insurance (catastrophes can still occur), heating, maintenance of the building structure, and the portion of the property tax that goes to infrastructure maintenance.

But under our current system, they've been incentivized to rent the business space from either a landlord or a bank for a hefty payment every month. When cash flows are predictable, this is merely extractive. But now that cash flows have slowed down, it's catastrophic.

The appropriate short-term policy answer is bail outs for small businesses (as well as individuals, as the employees out of work are in the same boat). But the government is outright corrupt, so big businesses received immediate bailouts while small businesses are left scraping for peanuts from a funding structure that was also designed to benefit banks.

The long term policy answer is to raise interest rates to discourage frivolous use of debt. This ranges from merely politically unpalatable (eg when Bush was trying to sell two wars), to downright painful (the payments on existing debt go up). Which then makes for a debt spiral.