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Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#121

Post by umvi »

t-writescode wrote: post #104
umvi wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And other reasonable people are concerned with the side effects of printing 3+ trillion dollars

A very frustrating thing with this statement is that it's very arguable that financing the survival of this country's citizens during a lockdown is _exactly_ the sort of thing the government should be doing, as well as minimizing the duration of the lockdown. It enables the status quo to return quickly and minimizes the change to the social fabric. Those are things I would have imagined conservatives would want: stab…

As I understand it, we have no saved money, we are just going deeper into debt. In 2020 alone we took on at least 4T of debt when in past years we only take on ~1T debt per year. And all we have to show for 2T was a "woefully inadequate" $1000 check. In order to pay everyone's rent for a year, we would need at least 12x as much, in other words a cool 24 Trillion which would more than double the entire debt the US current has. And for what? To save a few lives, the majority of whom will be dead before 2030 anyway? Mask and social distancing are huge low cost public health wins, no doubt, but suggesting going 24 trillion dollars into debt to save more lives is a huge red flag to me and I would push back.

Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#122

Post by ssully »

est31 wrote: post #49
hypervisorxxx wrote: post #39

The other thing not being mentioned is alot of families who could never afford to buy homes can now buy homes. It has also allowed alot of people to move into nicer areas of NYC that could not afford to before. Alot of people's quality of life has increased, and alot of people who lost their income on paper also lost their requirement to pay rent and avoid being evicted or just moved into their parents homes. There a…

Do you have a link for real estate prices going down? From what I saw it was mainly the rents that decreased.

Real estate prices are absolutely not going down. There was a dip at the onset of the pandemic, but prices started going back up in May and normalized over the summer.

There is speculation house prices will continue to rise into next year due to supply constraints (new house construction slowed from March-May and is still recovering, houses that do on the market are picked up quick, etc), but we will see how it plays out.

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPNHSUS

Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#123

Post by rayiner »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #31
just-juan-post wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FEDERAL government didn't do anything. STATE and LOCAL governments did. Why should the federal government bail out states for their actions? And yeah I will remember all this during the next election. I was a Democrat all my life until early 2020 and now I'm done. I'll be voting against them from now on.

Not saying you're wrong, but... what particularly did the Democrats do (or not do)?

Listening to Elizabeth Warren in 2019 (who I respected tremendously as someone who previously announced she was a "capitalist to her bones") put an intersectionality spin on every policy item did it for me. At first, the whole "person of color" thing was just weird, and now I find it incredibly grating and alienating. Like I can't listen to one of her speeches without feeling "othered."

Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#124

Post by pkaye »

nradov wrote: post #17
OminousWeapons wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the federal government. If you are going to shutter businesses and put people out of work, you need to pay the business owners and the employees who you have affected. Staying economically viable vs staying medically viable should have never been a tradeoff people had to make here, and Americans should all remember that when the next election rolls around.

The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the state and local governments. The federal government didn't force any businesses to close. There is a huge variance between states in pandemic control measures. If businesses are still open in Florida then why should Floridians pay federal income taxes to subsidize closed businesses in California? And states do have options for funding relief at the state le…

Florida is already a taker state instead of a giver. Why should we give them more if they can just tax themselves for the difference?

https://rockinst.org/issue-area/new-yorks-balance-of-payment...

Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#125

Post by uoaei »

rayiner wrote: post #115
uoaei wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the government does not have any of "its own" money - all money it can possibly distribute is taken from taxpayer's pockets This is absolutely not the case. The government owns and operates a mint, and we haven't been on the gold standard since Nixon. There is no zero-sum double-entry accounting when it comes to sovereign fiat currencies. If you analyze the monetary policy of the federal government like it's a fami…

I'm glad the left has moved right on over to "money doesn't exist." That'll end well.

Every dollar bill is an IOU from the federal government. It says so right on the paper bill: "This note is legal tender." Money only means something if people believe it means something. I can make up a new currency but if no one believes it has value, then it does not. Any and every economist you find will tell you the same.

With this sort of flexibility you are forced to abandon the zero-sum style of monetary policy, and you open up a lot of new possibilities for how to interact with the flows of monies. Republicans who shriek about the deficit know this, too, but keep their rhetoric the same because they and their friends benefit from the general public believing that the federal government works like "a family at the kitchen table," because they can shut down any talk of federal spending by pointing to that boogeyman.

Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#126

Post by mrguyorama »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #31
just-juan-post wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FEDERAL government didn't do anything. STATE and LOCAL governments did. Why should the federal government bail out states for their actions? And yeah I will remember all this during the next election. I was a Democrat all my life until early 2020 and now I'm done. I'll be voting against them from now on.

Not saying you're wrong, but... what particularly did the Democrats do (or not do)?

Don't you know? Democrat state governors and reps were just supposed to let people die for the economy!

Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#127

Post by henrikschroder »

bearjaws wrote: post #83
neuland wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Florida, Texas, and Sweden seem to be doing fine enough.

Tell that to the ICU nurses and doctors in Florida who have to code several people a day due to Covid...

Heart disease and cancer combined kill four times as many people every year, than what covid-19 has done this year.

About 10% of all the people who died in the US this year will have died from covid-19. Why are those 10% of deaths so much more terrible, so unimaginably horrible, that we're focusing exclusively on those, and completely ignoring the remaining 90% of deaths?

Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#128

Post by [deleted] »

uoaei wrote: post #94
DoreenMichele wrote: post #79

This is a real and serious problem and I wish people would take it more seriously. The actual solution is addressing the barriers to work created by Covid. I actively promoted the local Little Caesar's. At one point, they had so little business they were afraid they would go out of business, but they are unusually well-positioned to move to less risk of infection because they already had a pizza portal, it just wasn'…

Do you live in a rural place with a small, connected community? That's the only way your "promotions" would have had any impact. I find it hard to believe that posting on social media single-handedly saved that business. I find it much more likely that people started getting more acquainted with the new reality of the pandemic and after re-budgeting started buying food at places where you get lots of calories for che…

[deleted]

Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#129

Post by umvi »

jeromegv wrote: post #106
ceilingcorner wrote: post #68

Meanwhile, some of the strongest voices calling for near-permanent lockdowns came from the well-paid professional classes, who could afford to order Uber Eats twice a day and had zero chance of losing their over-inflated incomes. The continuing erosion of the middle class isn’t a good thing. Expect populist political rhetoric to continue growing.

Whatever the US did was not near permanent lockdowns, what is allowed to continue and be opened is more lenient than almost every country. The only countries with less restrictions than the US are opened exactly because they did a lockdown and kept the virus at bay. What kills the US economy is the virus being out there and making people afraid to get together into public settings.

I would argue the virus itself isn't making people afraid, it's media/government fear-mongering. In reality your average person has little to fear (besides the fear of spreading it to a vulnerable loved one).

Re: Nearly 8M Americans have fallen into poverty since summer

#130

Post by rayiner »

uoaei wrote: post #125
rayiner wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm glad the left has moved right on over to "money doesn't exist." That'll end well.

Every dollar bill is an IOU from the federal government. It says so right on the paper bill: "This note is legal tender." Money only means something if people believe it means something. I can make up a new currency but if no one believes it has value, then it does not. Any and every economist you find will tell you the same. With this sort of flexibility you are forced to abandon the zero-sum style of monetary polic…

Explain why the EU (and countries like Germany) impose tight limits on budget deficits.
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