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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

#151

Post by ceilingcorner »

just-juan-post wrote: post #149
ssully wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's safe to say there is a large portion of the population that will continue not eating indoors until they are vaccinated, or the infection numbers in their area go down significantly. I can't find articles to back it up, but I have read from restaurant owners saying that even when they were allowed to expand their indoor capacity, they were never hitting that limit. With that said, this is going to vary by…

If people are scared to go out then why even have lockdowns? Schrödinger's virus: We need lockdowns to save everyone but even if we didn't have lockdowns nobody would go anyway but we still need to lockdowns.

If the virus were actually as deadly as past examples, there wouldn’t be a need to impose lockdowns. People would avoid each other out of sheer self-preservation.

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

#152

Post by dragonwriter »

NoOneNew wrote: post #113
dragonwriter wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Class warfare is pointless. The position of the capitalist class, built on successful class warfare first against the pre-capitalist aristocracy and then against the working classes within capitalism, proves this to be false. As, for that matter, does the (arguably modest, but still very real) progress of the working class from the height of the system first described as “capitalism” in the late 19th and early 20th…

>The position of the capitalist class, built on successful class warfare first against the pre-capitalist aristocracy and then against the working classes within capitalism, proves this to be false. Name me a socialist/communist gov that did any better. Each implementation grew the class divides even more. So far China, I would say, is the most economically viable model due to their opening to international market pr…

> Name me a socialist/communist gov that did any better

I did. The “bourgeois socialism”, as Marx described it, of the reforms from the capitalism that Marx described to the modern mixed economy that has replaced it pretty much everywhere in the developed world. (Now, admittedly, Marx saw bourgeois socialism as ultimately doomed to reinforce or regress into capitalism, but, while there is always pressure from capitalists back toward classic capitalism, the doom he saw for it isn't clearly inevitable in practice.)

Maybe you are confused because rather than “bourgeois socialism” people tend to still describe these regimes as simply “capitalist”, despite the extensive role of public institutions limiting private property rights and diverting the returns from private gains into providing public goods.

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

#153

Post by umvi »

nobody9999 wrote: post #137
umvi wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources?

> So you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources? Absolutely. Steve the UberEats delivery driver can be moved into the ICU, putting folks on ventilators and providing critical care in a week or so, right? And Gustavo, the busboy can be out providing EMT services in just a…

This is just throwing your arms up in the air and saying it's unsolvable.

I don't give up. Make a temporary hospital with ip web cams pointed at all the vitals. Build a quick and dirty dashboard that lets doctors/nurses monitor dozens of patients at once instead of having to physically walk around everywhere. If engineers can get more done with less using automation, medical professionals can do it too.

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

#154

Post by mdavis6890 »

snarfy wrote: post #105
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.

The near-permanent lockdowns needed to be offset by government payment programs like they were in every other developed country except the US. If they shut everything down but don't offset it somehow, what do they expect the result to be? The $1200 check was laughable.

I agree we need more cash payments to humans. But we have to be careful not to confuse money with stuff (the goods and services produced by the economy). Giving money does not produce any more stuff, it only increases the competition for and price of the stuff that is being produced.

We are producing less stuff because of the pandemic, which means there is less to go around (however it gets allocated), and no amount of money will change that.

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

#155

Post by umvi »

dragonwriter wrote: post #145
umvi wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an emergency situation, you make do. Train temporary workers to man the temporary hospitals. Teach them how to know when to defer to a medical professional. You can hire a bunch of boy scouts to do the repetitive stuff, and have them call in a real doctor or nurse if symptom progression isn't matching their training.

> Train temporary workers to man the temporary hospitals. Teach them how to know when to defer to a medical professional. Normal hospitals are already staffed at pretty close to the maximum rate of less qualified to more expert staff for their caseload, and the easy caseload that requires less expert share of time is pushed out of hospitals entirely by the crisis. Surging additional minimally trained staff doesn't he…

Ok, then use technology to help the current staff do more. How many inefficiencies are preventing nurses and doctors from servicing more patients? Build a dashboard with the vitals of dozens of covid patients that a single qualified nurse can monitor instead of making a half dozen nurses all walk around to all the different beds and manually check everything

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

#156

Post by ryfia »

umvi wrote: post #121
t-writescode wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cur…

I don't think the math is quite right on this.

Assuming there are 200,000,000 people in the US over the age of 18, and assuming that each of them gets $1000/month for 12 months, we have 200,000,000 * 1000 * 12 = 2.4 Trillion, which is similar to what we actually spent. The problem is, instead of uniformly distributing that 2.4 trillion among our citizens, we added complexity (and waste due to overhead) by giving money to special interests (airlines for example) and big businesses in various ways.

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

#157

Post by umvi »

ryfia wrote: post #156
umvi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cur…

I don't think the math is quite right on this. Assuming there are 200,000,000 people in the US over the age of 18, and assuming that each of them gets $1000/month for 12 months, we have 200,000,000 * 1000 * 12 = 2.4 Trillion, which is similar to what we actually spent. The problem is, instead of uniformly distributing that 2.4 trillion among our citizens, we added complexity (and waste due to overhead) by giving mone…

Yeah, I just multiplied CARES by 12 to get my number. I'm assuming you don't want to just let all the airline companies crash and burn along with all the restaurants, gyms, etc. Because then after the 12 months are up you find that millions are out of jobs and need another 12 months of rent while they look for new jobs, etc.

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

#158

Post by nobody9999 »

umvi wrote: post #153
nobody9999 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you are saying our hospital beds and staff are fixed immutable resources and that in an emergency all other variables must be sacrificed in order to not exceed those fixed immutable resources? Absolutely. Steve the UberEats delivery driver can be moved into the ICU, putting folks on ventilators and providing critical care in a week or so, right? And Gustavo, the busboy can be out providing EMT services in just a…

This is just throwing your arms up in the air and saying it's unsolvable. I don't give up. Make a temporary hospital with ip web cams pointed at all the vitals. Build a quick and dirty dashboard that lets doctors/nurses monitor dozens of patients at once instead of having to physically walk around everywhere. If engineers can get more done with less using automation, medical professionals can do it too.

>This is just throwing your arms up in the air and saying it's unsolvable.

You're putting words in my mouth and then arguing against them. I think that's called a 'strawman argument'.

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

#159

Post by maxerickson »

lumost wrote: post #98
save_ferris wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fear of "looking poor" is so real in the US, which makes it harder to see who's struggling. It also creates this cognitive dissonance I've noticed here on HN where an article gets posted with pictures of the extended lines at food banks and people point out that most people seem to be driving relatively new cars, therefore why are they in line at a food bank? I think a lot of people don't understand how poverty r…

cars made in the last 15 years don’t look that different from each other. You can purchase a 7-8 yo mass market vehicle for 2-6k that will run alright. Having used cars older than that as a daily driver, the cost of repairs/downtime outstrip the cost of replacing the vehicle more often than not. Not driving isn’t really an option in the US, and driving a clunker will raise some flags to coworkers/other parents in the…

Glancing at craigslist here, the first 3 vehicles under $6000 are a 2010, a 2008 and a 2006. The low mileage of the group is 133,000. They are dealer listings also, so probably not the best deals, but there aren't many others at the price.

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

#160

Post by t-writescode »

umvi wrote: post #144
t-writescode wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a very real sense, what more have the "lockdowns" in the US been than "masks and social distancing"? In places where "social distancing" minimums have been impossible, the places have closed. I'm in one of the most strict places in the entire United States, but I can still go to most every store I want, including hair salons. I'm only barred from places where there's a LOT of breathing (gym, church with singing),…

> what more have the "lockdowns" in the US been than "masks and social distancing"? Destruction of the service industries? Educational handicaps on multiple generations of students? My point is that it's cheap to wear a mask and socially distance yourself while otherwise carrying on with life. It's extremely expensive on society to force everyone to stay home as much as possible and avoid certain businesses. It's exp…

I would put schools under "places you can't reasonably social distance".

That's why online school has been such a common thing; but, the United States isn't very good at it, and we haven't built out the appropriate social support structures and patterns (and have gone against those patterns in many cases), so it hasn't been especially viable.

Remote learning was considered better than cancelling school altogether; but, then we ran into the problem of parents and children working and going to school in the same place and that came with its own burdens.

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