David Brooks lays it out:
"Well, here, there's a lot of blame to go along.
I would say that, when we look at the bill that was passed by Congress a couple weeks ago, this stimulus bill, we will regard it as one of the worst economic packages maybe in American history, certainly in a time of crisis.
What they're doing in Europe is, they're preserving the businesses. They're keeping people employed. They're just paying businesses to say, we're going to give you some money, and — but you're going to keep your payroll. So people don't have the threat of unemployment, they don't have the insecurity of unemployment, they don't have the possibility that they will never get a job again or they won't get a job for a long time.
They just sort of freeze the economy. And we didn't do that. We took a more individualistic approach, we will just give you $1,200. We had a backstop measure, which is $350 billion for businesses. We should increase that to $600 billion, $700 billion, so businesses can keep their payroll.
And there's a lot of blame to go around. The Democrats took this option because they didn't want to be seen to be bailing out business. The Republicans, I'm not sure they had a coherent thought in their heads.
And so this is, I think, a catastrophic error, which we should just be fixing very quickly."
That makes so much sense!
Why didn't we think of that?
Maybe our leadership is so polarized by insults and blaming they never thought of it.
Too bad. Now, our economy is going to be really screwed.
PBS Newshour Shields and Brooks.
"it's better to have the not unemployed.
I mean, there are going to be some people who are unemployed. And for them, certainly, the unemployment insurance is there. But if you could sit at home knowing that you had a job, and knowing that you were getting paid for that job, even though you were sitting at home, and that you were probably going to go back to that job, that seems to me the right way to do this.
And I — I understand, culturally, why we didn't do it. I understand, politically, why bailing out business seem to be a bad thing. But it's fixable. And when Chuck Schumer said earlier in the program that he wants something else, I would hope this would be the something else we would do before the end of April."
We need a new Bill that tells the businesses to hire those people back and the government will pay for it. And the workers who just lost health insurance would then get it right back. This is insane to let those jobs go away and those businesses fail. If that happens we won't be able to quickly put it back together again. And that's just going to hurt our economy for a long time.
I know a trashed economy would hurt DT's chances of reelection, but this is too much of a price to pay for that. All these lost jobs. That's people on the edge, slipping over. We can't allow that. If it was just the stock market that would be a fair trade-off. That's rich people getting less rich. That doesn't undermine the foundation of our economy, consumerism. But all this unemployment is too much. The people being affected by this don't have any safety cushion, and while they are worried about their income, they also have to deal with coronavirus. Brooks is right.
