> “Our hope is that by using the data, we’d be able to slowly lift restrictions over the next three months,”
vs
>aiming to open up the bare minimum amount required to avoid riots or economic collapse
why do you believe the root goal is "keep people at home" vs "respond to a disease?"
It's especially frustrating because I've repeatedly seen people argue that it's a strawman, that nobody's really planning to stay at home forever. Even in this comments section, about an article where LA county says "yeah we're staying at home for the next 3 months at least", people insist they didn't mean it!
I hate this juvenile, dismissive angle that's so pervasive here. There are serious considerations here. It's not just about enjoying life. First: how are we going to fund compulsory unemployment for another 3 months?
Even so, this is not something anyone should apologize over.
Life should be worth living. To someone who has lived their whole life being able to enjoy life in any which way is experiencing a massive shock right now. Of course people want to be able to go to crowded bars, be around other people, go to concerts, ride roller coasters, get wasted, etc. We rely on these things because life is boring at best and usually bad for a lot of people. If we don't have anything to look forward to, even simple things, we lose hope. Gee, I'm really sorry that it seems selfish or even "conservative" to the smarty pants who are content living indoors and consuming media and frozen dinners. Most of us get tired of that and it becomes frightening when our jobs are in question or have no job at all. Just being able to go to a crowded bar, be around other people, having a pint, and not having to wear masks, sounds really damned good right now.
I understand that there's always a cost benefit analysis to all of this, but the high and mighty attitude towards people who simply want to feel happy needs to stop. It damages every discussion.
EDIT: Many of the people who make that kind of argument also say "cry me a river" when someone whose business or job is "nonessential" says anything negative about their predicament. Um, you people ought to look at your own jobs and question just how "essential" they are. I don't think I've ever worked an "essential" job in my life, yet I'm payed much more than most "essential" workers are.
Everyone wants to simply feel happy. Everyone is sick and tired of all of this. Everyone wants to go out to a bar and have a pint. But we can't. We just can't. And not because the government says so. But because many many many more people than necessary will die if we do. That's the reality we live in now. And not understanding that, while acting as if your feelings matter more than others' lives makes you sound like a spoiled child. That is what people are being "high and mighty" about.
Yes, actually, we can. We can reopen things like this with caution, some new social precautions, protect those who are vulnerable, and calculatingly reevaluate the risk once it turns out that the situation has become more or less safe.
This idea that we "can't" is simply bogus and based on nothing. And the idea that people, who don't put the same weight on the risks the way that you do, are being childish, is asinine. People with your position might sound like they're the adults in the room, but a policy that is more rigorous is not necessarily the better policy.
> And not understanding that, while acting as if your feelings matter more than others' lives makes you sound like a spoiled child.
Clearly, I'm a spoiled little child who doesn't care about the lives of others. /s
How would you like it if we made the stay-at-home orders permanent, decreased the speed limits to 25 MPH, and banned all drugs and alcohol, and put strict limits on added sugar and fat? After all, we could save tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives if we all just sacrificed our productivity and happiness. If we're going to apply your argument towards a single virus, why not go all the way?
Even if you were to say yes, the vast majority of people don't actually want that because this idea that we're all supposed to stay alive is a relatively new idea and, in order to accomplish it, requires a lot of sacrifice. We don't want to live this way forever, even if it makes sense from a utilitarian standpoint. There is nothing wrong with accepting that a percentage of people are always going to die. This is not spoiled or childish.
You aren't using the word "can" in its meaning related to ability. You are making value judgement with respect to your perceived results of doing vs. not doing something. When you say "we can't", you actually mean "we shouldn't" or "we mustn't".
Moreover, I'd like to point out that your argument that many more people die if we lift the lockdown is based on the model simulations. These model simulations already don't match the reality: we do not observe predicted exponential decay of cases to 0. When we lift the lockdown, and the outcomes will keep not matching the models, which consistently overpredict number of deaths, I expect people like you to keep saying that if we kept lockdown longer, we could have avoided more deaths, based on... model simulations.
I think we need to stop confusing the map, that is, the model simulations, with the territory, that is, the reality.
So he just sits around day after day watching his business go down the toilet.
Or worse, they run it out, go back to work, then there's another lock-down because infection rates go up. Now they're not eligible for unemployment at all because they haven't paid into the system for too long.
(At least that's how it works in the three states where I have experience filing for unemployment. I doubt that California lets people collect money forever.)
There's a long history of this happening in the USA if you're interested: https://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Good-Intentions-Entitlement...
He should pay his employees more money.
You can't just pretend that every business can magically afford to raise wages. This isn't Apple paying kids in China 50 cents to build an iPhone they sell for $1,000, this is a local business that's probably barely able to pay the founder a middle-class salary in the best of times.
If people are afraid to be in public, then the restaurants, bars, and shops won't see full-scale business return. Those jobs and business will be lost anyway, perhaps with more people infected than necessary. Or, we try and find some middle-ground "new normal" that lets people feel safe in public. Or something else? I have no idea and I doubt many people in this comment section really know either.
Because there's no point debating such a question. Arguing that we should leave lockdowns in place because people would be too scared to go outside even if we lifted the lockdowns, is tautological.
If the argument is that people are going to stay home anyway, then we should open the economy on first principles.
So yeah, of course there is a point in debating such a question. And there are real ways to find answers. Probably even better ones than what I said.
That's 300 billion dollars every month... And that's for only 150 million adults...(there's a lot more than that)
It's estimated to have cost about 3 Trillion dollars for the Iraq war, a 17+ year conflict[1].
At $300 billion a month (on the extreme low end), that's $3 Trillion every 10 months.
Put another way - we could fund another 17+ year long armed conflict every 10 months at that rate.
The entire 2021 federal budget is projected to be around 4.8 Trillion... and they estimate they'll only bring in $3.8 Trillion in revenue.
Disregarding that your projection is grossly innacurate, how is this something we can do?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_cost_of_the_Iraq_W...
Basically move to a more redistributive system like Europe, which can afford to do this for a lot of their citizens.
That's how we've funded war-like efforts in the past, and if this is likened to a WWII style mobilization effort (which it has been by several politicians, then the well off citizens need to pitch in much more than they are now).
If you took all of Bill Gates' ($107 billion) and all of Jeff Bezos' ($145 billion) and all of Larry Ellison's ($59 billion) money... every single penny, you'd still wouldn't be able to pay for even a single complete month of this program.
It's an enormous amount of money.
What the Nordic counties do doesn't scale to the third largest country by population... Not to mention they don't pay for their own military protection (barely) among other differences.
Funded wars? Wars have almost always involved massive debt being taken on by the federal government. It's just simply not feasible to run that way for long term.
Why does the absolute population number matter in this case? Whether you have 1 million people or 300 million, the viability of any tax scheme hinges on the relative proportions.
In any case, what Nordics actually do is tax everybody's salaries. Not just the rich, but also the middle class.
Because GDP and total potential tax revenue isn't proportional like you assume.
In Norway's case (5 million pop, $434 Billion GDP), that's $86,800 per person.
In the US' case (328 million pop, $20.5 Trillion GDP), that's $62,500 per person.
A small country with a couple very successful businesses can spread that total potential tax revenue further. Particularly if they don't pay much for their defense costs, but I digress.
In the US, we have a lot more people, and most of those aren't high earners and don't contribute much to the GDP nor tax revenue. It's estimated about 76 million Americans pay zero federal taxes[1].
The point was, at our scale, we'd be doubling our national budget to accomplish this any way you look at it.
That's going to require a lot more than just taxing the rich more. It's going to require a lot more than just taxing everyone more.
The scale of this is difficult to think about. People often point to the bloated military budget as something to pull from. Well, the projected 2021 budget for the entire DoD is $740 Billion. At the rate of spending we're discussing, that's just about only 2 months of this program... to the cost of having zero military.
All that for what purpose? Just to give some of it back every month? That would basically just be a "feel-good" program then... confiscate your money and give it right back to you in a government stipend.
I just don't see a realistic way to pull this sort of program off. Unless we take it down to something more reasonable like $100 a month... which would only be $15 Billion per month, $180 Billion per year. That's much more manageable... but what's $100 going to do realistically?
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/personal-finance/how-much-do...
As I've laid out... you gotta come up with $3+ Trillion more every year... at a bare minimum. The real numbers probably look closer to $4-5 Trillion if the plan is to give everyone over 18 this $2,000 monthly, plus you have all this Bureaucracy you'll need to manage this program. You gotta double the national budget and then some.
There are no numbers that make sense to pull that off. It's a fantasy to think otherwise.
The bureaucracy to manage such a program is orders of magnitude less than for any other welfare program, because it's not means-tested. In fact, since IRS already has the bureaucracy and the logistics to handle tax returns, there's no reason why this couldn't be tacked onto that.
There are a lot of them. Stop acting like this is just about entitled tech workers demanding a night on the town.
It's a food line. This is what they got at the end
Politicians simply don't get it. White collars do not get it. They will, soon. Not politicians, the white collars.
I've replaced the title with a phrase from the article that manages to be both accurate and noncommittal.
You don't go to a headline for subtlety.