Another 1.3M Americans File for Unemployment

>Almost 40% of homes in America are owned free and clear (no mortgage).

looking merely at owned homes is ignoring everybody that rents. Renters falling behind on their rent are equally likely to be evicted as soon as the moratoriums are listed.

(and that in fact goes to my point about "your rent/mortgage is someone else's asset", a renter who's not making mortgage payments is probably still putting someone else's mortgage in the red and causing havoc in the rest of the financial system. I don't personally shed too much of a tier for the personal finances of highly overleveraged landlords doing the BRRRR type bullshit, it's been screwing up pricing for renters for a decade now, but it's a problem for the rest of the financial system too.)

BRRRR: https://investfourmore.com/brrrr-method/

Also, as another poster mentioned, the demographics of home ownership tilt very differently. Lots of boomers own their homes, in many cases free and clear. The numbers for people in their 30s (let alone 20s) are pretty low these days, so your statistic basically ignores everyone under 50.

(And in fact even if we got younger people into homes, the same wealth transfer that boomers enjoyed probably cannot be replicated - it was artificially created by lowering interest rates from the highs of 19% in the 70s/80s down to basically 0% now, allowing people to finance much larger amounts of money and causing the underlying asset values to soar. Nor would it be desirable to do so.)

And in general I disagree with your comment further down in the thread about "you can say anything with statistics". The obvious thrust of that argument is: gee, I guess we better just not use statistics and argue about feelings instead. That's so much better.

It's pretty much an argument made by people whose positions can't be justified by actual data - they don't reconsider their positions, they just want to stop looking at the data.

A buddy of mine got his too within days, I wait since early May.

The EDD (California) did process millions of applications (or so they claim), but more than a million are still outstanding.

The problem seems to me to be in their mission objective: they view every applicant first and foremost as a potential "wellfare queen" and attempt to prove that as a fact (17 years ago, in the aftermath of the Internet bubble burst, I lost my job as well, applied for unemployment insurance benefit and the phone interview I went though was as bizarre as unpleasant -- I didn't get to the phone interview this time 'round).

I wished they would rather operate like the IRS: after preliminary, automated checks using tax records (was the person employed by employer as claimed, is that person now employed?) hand out the money and perform selective, random in-depth audits asynchronously.

This is probably wrong. Quoting from the wikipedia article on this phrase:

  > The phrase derives from the full sentence, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.";
  > it was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain and others, who mistakenly attributed it to the British prime 
  > minister Benjamin Disraeli. The phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were
  > years after his death. The phrase was attributed to an anonymous writer in mid-1891 and later that year to Sir 
  > Charles Dilke, but several others have been listed as originators of the quote, including frequent erroneous 
  > attribution to Twain himself.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies%2C_damned_lies%2C_and_sta...

Money is created by the government, and creating more of it to distributed equally across individuals just redistributes the relative purchasing power from people with more than average to people with less than average.

So it's better to have rural dwellers with an outsized voice in deciding what happens in city areas?

You also are performing a convenient geographic sidestep where suddenly "where you live" isn't the country or even the state but is really only concerned with the local. So the rest of the people who live in the nation are diminished.

Localism has led to lots of problems in American history, now we can add a shitshow of a Coronavirus response on top of the others.

The party of localism tends to be gung-ho about that huge federal military operation... yet refuses a necessarily-similar intervention in a pandemic.