Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#521

Post by globular-toast » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 9:50 PM UTC

blaser-waffle wrote: post #371

globular-toast wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$600/week after tax is surely a massive amount and enough to give a family a very comfortable lifestyle. I always thought it was cheaper to live in the US than in the UK. That amount here would give you a luxurious lifestyle. What am I missing?

600 USD per week is just under £500 quid GBP per week, or about 2000 pounds a month, or 24K GBP a year. Quick google search shows that the median income for the UK is £585 per week, which works out at around £30,420 a year (or $37,647.03 USD). Hardly luxurious in the UK or US. Probably enough to get by, but nothing amazing.

Where are you getting these figures from? Is that before tax? Median household disposal of income is about 28k. And that's household, not individual. Many households are earning two incomes.

Can't believe how out of touch with reality some of the people on here are. My post is sitting on -4 right now. 24KGBP per year, after tax, for being unemployed. You've got to be kidding me.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#522

Post by globular-toast » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 9:53 PM UTC

cultus wrote: post #456

globular-toast wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$600/week after tax is surely a massive amount and enough to give a family a very comfortable lifestyle. I always thought it was cheaper to live in the US than in the UK. That amount here would give you a luxurious lifestyle. What am I missing?

This is such an insane post. Do you literally have no idea how much things cost?

I do my accounts quite carefully and I'm very well aware how much things cost. My rent for a nice flat in a city is 650GBP per month. You can double that for rough monthly expenditure, and that's an expensive month.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#523

Post by andrekandre » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 9:56 PM UTC

AsyncAwait wrote: post #125

ihm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already most Americans support Medicare for all – it’s our bought elected officials who don’t.

Seeing how they voted for Joe Biden who openly mocks the idea, as a non-American, I am very skeptical of how the support is manifesting.

a lot of biden primary voters actually do like bernie and his policies (including m4a) but they are voting out of fear that bernie couldn’t win (among other reasons) [0]

[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/11/sanders-voters-ele...

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#524

Post by elliekelly » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

tathougies wrote: post #412

_curious_ wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"unemployment benefits can pay up to an equivalent of $50-60K/year right now." Wow. It's bizarre one can neither create nor add value yet proceed to receive thousands of dollars for an extended period of time (often multiples more than they will ever "pay in" to the system). I know too many people already milking it before the pandemic (including family & friends). I accept that it is their personal choice and I don'…

hacker news is a hivemind. I don't agree with everything you say (one can argue there is economic value in staying home during an outbreak of a highly transmissible virus) but I do think you are right in a lot of ways (it's a perverse incentive, and unproductivity should not be subsidized in general).

Staying home is productive though. It slows the spread of the virus and adds value (in terms of capacity) to our hospitals and healthcare system. You can think of unemployment benefits as the government purchasing that time from employees and instructing them to use it in the most valuable way to us as a society: do nothing.

The person's time is valuable (and so they should be compensated) but the most valuable use of their time in the short-term is to not use it at all. Tech does this all the time. We just call it "rest and vest".

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#525

Post by malandrew » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:15 PM UTC

buzzkillington wrote: post #512

malandrew wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The virtuous cycle provided by a functioning market is not a pyramid scheme. Not even close. Pyramid schemes transfer wealth from the bottom to the top while creating no new additional wealth . America is creating tons of additional wealth and how much each gets from that wealth is proportional to one's leverage and one's leverage is generally proportional to how much one is able to contribute to wealth generation (i…

The US has destroyed nearly one trillion dollars in wealth for the bottom 50% since 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

You're going to have to elaborate on what you mean by "destroyed".

Also, the US isn't a single entity. It's an agglomeration of 330 million people interacting with one another and it's various levels of governance at the local, state and federal level.

Natural disasters can destroy wealth by destroying assets. Individuals can squander their wealth through bad investments. A government can steal wealth through taxes. Wealth can be forfeited through civil or criminal proceedings. Wealth can dwindle in real terms due to inflation. So on and so forth.

But to say that the "US destroyed wealth" makes no sense and isn't either a supportable or falsifiable statement.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#526

Post by lainga » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

apatters wrote: post #458

stupandaus wrote: post #2

Building on my analysis from last week: 1. This week's 6.6M new jobless claims represents ~4% of the estimated ~160-165M US Workforce. 2. This is incremental to the 3.3M new jobless claims filed week ending 3/21, totaling ~10M total jobless claims in the past 2 weeks. 3. The US unemployment rate was ~3.5% as of EOM February [1], so cumulatively that means we've hit ~10% unemployment as of EOW 3/28 (~10M incremental j…

If the unemployment rate continues to rise at this pace (about 7% every two weeks), it will match the peak during the Great Depression (25%) around the end of April. That's 40 million people who will have no income and likely no health care in the middle of a pandemic. Not sure how to process this information honestly.

Well, think about it this way, everyone will be 200% unemployed by the end of the year.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#527

Post by dataflow » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

wayoutthere wrote: post #393

mehrdadn wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah I see, okay thank you.

This kind of info usually circulates in the corporate world for a week before it hits the wider media zeitgeist. My company has been holding weekly analyst briefings on what to expect. Right now, the sources I have say to expect to be WFH and "socially distanced" until July or August at the earliest. Restaurants will probably start slowly opening back up around then, but conferences or sporting events are going to be…

Great info (and scary), thank you. Is this based on assumptions that have a decent potential to not hold true, like e.g. lack of vaccines and adequate testing? Or does this assume those will happen in the next (say) ~year? And would you know if there are predictions on whether e.g. housing prices might fall?

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#528

Post by theonemind » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

throwaway55554 wrote: post #158

buzzkillington wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all this for a virus that kills around 1% of the people who get it, and the majority of them are retired. Future generations will look at us and wonder how we were this stupid.

Do you know 100 people? Pick one. Crass, no? So what if it's 1%. It's life. Nothing else matters.

We don't like to think about it explicitly, but human life has a market or dollar value. You can figure it out by how much we spend on things like safety measures and court settlements and judgments for deaths. As it turns out, it runs about $7 million per person in the United States.

That does make some sense. None of us picked the circumstances of our birth, but we have billions of people because of the economy, because we don't all grow our own food, because some people specialize in scientific research, etc. Now, we have billions of people that depend on a functioning economy, and if it doesn't function, people will die that way as well.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#529

Post by Der_Einzige » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:50 PM UTC

Yet you wouldn't know it based on the stock market.

Where is this collapse you all talk about? Donald Pump and Powell will just use infinite QE and monetary policy to fix all of our problems. After all, the US Dollar is still strong due to a liquidity shortage world-wide from everyone being desperate to convert domestic money to USD

Until that liquidity crisis dries up within the world, stonks seem only go up. Money printer goes brrrrr. I've never seen markets behave so effing irrationally before. Investors are pants on head stupid at a level that boggels my mind.

"markets can be irrational longer than you can stay solvent" is being proven to be sage advice with this pandemic.

Re: Additional 6.6M File for Initial Unemployment Benefits [pdf]

#530

Post by greedo » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:54 PM UTC

kazen44 wrote: post #463

0xffff2 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 70 year old today was born in 1950. What have they experienced that's worse than this? I think this is going to be unlike anything in living memory.

my grandfather was a teen during ww2. This behaviour was common with him aswell. Saving even the bones of chicken/cows to make stock. when a was a smile child and was nagging him for something to eat, he used to tell me i have never experienced hunger, only "trek". (which would be roughly translated to snackish).

My father was a butcher's son during the Depression. Whenever someone in the family would say "I'm starving!" he would get mad and explain that you had no idea what you were talking about.