Which View Will Win?
Democrats want to extend benefits. Republicans, led by Trump seek a back-to work bonus.
Fox News comments Here’s what Trump’s back-to-work bonus could look like
Republicans are resisting an extension of the $600 expanded unemployment benefit implemented as part of the CARES Act in March, and the Trump administration has instead pushed a so-called “back-to-work bonus.”
Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman has a plan that would provide individuals returning to work with a temporary $450 a week payment on top of their wages for several weeks.
Kudlow called Portman’s plan a “good idea” during an interview with Fox News.
Texas Republican Kevin Brady has proposed turning unemployment benefits into a bonus for returning to work.
Specifically, it would give workers two weeks’ worth of $600 payments if they find a job, or $1,200.
Expiring Benefits
The $600 pandemic benefit will expire on July 31 unless Congress agrees to an extension. At the end of June, more than 19 million people received benefits.
At Least for a While, It Pays Better to Be Unemployed
On May 18, I commented At Least for a While, It Pays Better to Be Unemployed
That must end, not slowly, but immediately. Unemployment insurance should never pay more than someone was making before.
Pick a limit, but I suggest something like 60% maximum.
If you make it zero, you immediately throw people off the cliff edge via government-mandated shutdowns.
Trump’s View
Trump wants to cut payroll taxes (FICA etc.) for those who find a job.
The nice thing about Trump’s idea is the that it benefits lower wage employees the most because of the FICA cutoff at $137,700 for 2020.
But what if previously-employed people cannot find a job or simply do not want to?
Two Flawed Approaches
- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s approach encourages people not to work.
- Republican approaches punish people who genuinely want a job but cannot find one.
The correct compromise is not to to do both but rather to provide some benefit to those who return to work while tapering benefits for those who don’t to ensure people do not take advantage of free benefits.
As a Libertarian, it pains me to suggest government to do anything. But doing nothing also implies there never would have been any shutdowns, with clearly disastrous consequences.
In this case, if Government mandates a shutdown, then it has to properly mitigate the consequences. Competing views show that is easier said than done.
Getting the compromise wrong would be a huge disaster.
Mish
As the governments and courts of the US are owned by the wealthiest and big corporations, any bill to help average workers must include big portions of welfare for the wealthy and big corporations. After all, they bought the government and they are going to use it to their advantage.
Are we sure the GOP hasn’t become the party of Bernie Sanders with all this free stuff they want to hand out?
They have been since, at least, back before Johnson beat Goldwater. That certainly seems to have cemented their faith that pandering to the Free Shit Army was the only way to hitch a ride on the Gravy Train.
More realistically, since Teddy R.
You say that as if the socialist system is succeeding in dealing with it….. Socialism does not help anyone except the feudal lords who control it.
The basic problem with liberalism / socialism is the moral hazard created by the immorality of their political construct. The decisions based on moral hazard creates the need for additional immoral actions to deal with the problems created. This works exactly like the lie witch requires ever increasing numbers of lies to explain the original lie.
In this case, we have the immoral theft by force of one group in order to give benefits to another. We continue to borrow from the future to pay for our current wants and needs. The victims for our current theft by force are the innocent children of today. They will be saddled with the inflated tax bills in the future to pay for the free rides being taken by their parents today. Their quality of life will be diminished and many will suffer in ways we cannot imagine today.
Mish does the inability of libertarianism to deal with a pandemic cause you to reconsider your views?
Dictatorships are the perfect government, so long as the Dictator is beneficent and wise. Unfortunately, they never are.
You reckon the pandemic will somehow meaningfully and negatively affect population growth in Afghan tribal territories? As opposed to in Dear Leader ran totalitarian dumps like Brazil and the US?
Does anyone believe in this banking system anymore ?
If Trump wants to have any chance of re-election he needs to extend benefits at the end of July. This reminds me of Herbert Bush who completely missed the point and held back stimulus. Even if the numbers appear to be turning up, probably a dead cat bounce, the unemployed are going to need help for a while. Besides talking about a payroll tax cut or bonus for returning to work doesn’t cut it when people can’t return to work. Talking about infrastructure jobs , which take months to put in place, while people are forced to lock down is pretty useless.
“Remember it’s the economy stupid.”
It pains me that we aren’t putting more money toward fighting the virus! China tested 10 million people in less than two weeks. They and many other countries spent heavily to beat the virus which then heals the economy. We are doomed if we don’t invest in fighting the virus.
How does testing beat the virus ? Research and development are what beat viruses along. Testing doesnt do anything to the virus directly or indirectly.
“How does testing beat the virus ? ”
The same way looking out the windshield is useful when driving a car. Despite moving the steering wheel and brakes, being what actually avoids accidents.
Bad analogy. Testing isnt a cure. It helps but it isnt beating the virus. The virus cannot be beat with testing alone.
If you want to solve a problem, it is generally helpful to have a clue what you are dealing with.
“The $600 pandemic benefit will expire on July 31 unless Congress agrees to an extension.”
…
BUT … from CBS news:
Some of the roughly 33 million workers who are now claiming unemployment benefits may be in for an unwelcome surprise next month. The extra $600 in weekly unemployment benefits that are due to expire on July 31 may end a week earlier in some states.
The reason comes down to a technicality: the schedule for paying out unemployment benefits. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or the CARES Act, set July 31 — a Friday — as the final day for paying the additional $600 in weekly pandemic-relief benefits. But some states pay out their unemployment benefits on weeks that end on Saturdays or Sundays.
If that’s the case in the state you live in, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, the last week to receive the extra benefit will be the week ending Saturday, July 25, or Sunday, July 26.
Among the states where unemployment benefits will end earlier than July 31 are California and New York, with their labor departments ending their payment cycles on July 25 and July 26, respectively. They also have more workers claiming unemployment than any other states, with more than 3 million in California and 1.8 million in New York, according to an analysis from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
After that date, unemployment benefits will return to their pre-pandemic levels, which vary according to state but are considerably less generous. For instance, the regular unemployment benefit in California is $167 per week, while laid-off New Yorkers receive up to $504 per week, depending on their income while working.
Here is the real story for those that want to sit and squabble about who gets what and how they get it.
Looming evictions may soon make 28 million homeless in U.S., expert says
Of course homeless people don’t vote, for the most part they cannot. But still, if this is even half true it would be an EPIC event in our history. And that level of homelessness would not affect just those now sleeping in cars or parks, it would kill off millions of landlords that have empty units, it would kill the housing market as millions of houses are abandoned by people that cannot pay the mortgages. It would kill the zombie banksters….. no wait, of course what am I thinking, the Fed will make sure they get enough money to keep their shareholders afloat and rolling in cash.
Trust me, we are still better than China and the Uyghurs 😉
Homelessness? Who cares? Jobs? Who cares? I say we make the rich richer and the poor poorer. As long as there’s no concentration camps, we are clearly winning!!
“As long as there’s no concentration camps, we are clearly winning!!”
I haven’t seen any comparisons, but I wonder how many people are currently locked up in US prisons, vs how many were in German camps back when…..
Of course, the progressives are told to chant “it’s diiiiferent thiiiiis tiiiime. My Dear Leader is a Good Dear Leader. NOt a baaaad one, like the other Dearl Leaders..” And, they are seemingly dumb enough to fall for it as well…
Evicting 28 million people takes a lot of effort, if only the saps have the sense to make doing so as hard as possible.
So, what we have here, is have another answer to “What Will the Next Covid Stimulus Bill Look Like?”:
It will pay people exactly enough to allow them to pay “their” rent. As in, every penny will go to useless banksters and other leeching deadweights. None to anyone else.
As an aside, the way a free market would easily solve this, if we had anything resembling one; is that 1)renters can’t pay hence won’t, 2) hence landlords can’t afford the mortgage, so they’ll walk away. 3)Then, Banks, which are too levered, they go belly up. 4) Then housing gets firesold, by what is ultimately The Fed, considering how levered all banks are and The Fed is at the top of the pyramid of leverage. 5) And then, people get back in their houses. Just at much lower prices, and with much less debt attached.
It’s not as if the houses go up in smoke just because someone defaults. We’ll still have the same number of houses, and the same number of people. So there’s no fundamental reason why more people will become homeless.
We had a foretaste of that in the GFC, I know I did when the house I looked at mid 2007 at $275k and there were people buying them at that price, I told the RE Agent to call me when they dumped down to $150k and walked away. So the following April I did buy because they dropped from $275k all the way down to $129k less than the cost to build which was around 99 (they were three story townhouses and materials were a lot cheaper then, they had almost no land other than their foundation footprint).
But the following year I realized that the neighborhood was being used to house dirt poor immigrants that brought gang tagging and such with them, then was screwed over by Chase when WaMu went belly up, and I could not sell even for the $129k because foreclosures of identical townhouses had dropped to $60k. I also eventually had to walk away. But unlike the other foreclosures Chase was being propped up by the Fed so they did not have to dump properties on their books at 60k, they held my house for 4.5 years and all the while my credit was ruined, and the clock would not even start ticking on the waiting period after foreclosure till you could buy again (VA home loans that is 3 years) and the sheriffs sale started the clock on when the foreclosure was dated to. That is what pushed me into BK even though all debts were basically settled.
I should hope you are one of those people that will never know anything but financial security Stuki, because what you do not seem to know is that our laws and especially personal chapter 7 BK is written to favor business, it is not the fresh start everyone seems conditioned to think it is. The law is vindictive towards debtors. Even in cases where the debtors made all the right decisions but through no fault of their own had no rational choice but to file.
As I said, even if that estimate is only half right, and government finds a way to assist half of those people in the article that still leaves 14 million people homeless. And that is well beyond the point where it is an economic problem, it then is a social and political catastrophe. We are talking war, revolution, you saw the riots over Floyd George, what do you think they will look like when it is millions and millions of homeless people who say F’it, if I have to be homeless I am taking you rich stockholder pricks with me, and start to burn down skyscapers instead of just an occasional Wendy’s?
“We are talking war, revolution, you saw the riots over Floyd George, what do you think they will look like when it is millions and millions of homeless people who say F’it, if I have to be homeless I am taking you rich stockholder pricks with me, and start to burn down skyscapers instead of just an occasional Wendy’s?”
You almost make it sound, as if you consider that somehow a bad thing……..
You do not know how bad it can get, and it would take far less than you think it would to end this country, if you already speak Mandarin or russian that is fine, but the real threat is that an unstable US is ripe for a fascist takeover and that is not even funny.
The only upside of things being as bad as they can get, is that nothing can make it any worse than it already is…..
The fundamental problem with reflexively, and to no end, serially falling for the “The System will collapse” hobgoblin, is that it is trivial for the Junta to steal and rob until The System is about to Collapse. Than scare the saps into bending over and ponying up to “Save” it. Again, and again and again and again…..
OTOH, slave revolts, while risky, and hardly peaceful; are as good as it get. When you are a slave. Nothing to be irrationally scared of, nor willing to bend over to no end in order to go away.
As long whatever goes down ends up with “The System” no longer sustainable, that’s a positive development, when “The System” is nothing at all, whatsoever, other than a simple theft, enslavement, torture and harassment racket. With not a lick more legitimacy, nor utility, than the Antebellum slavery system.
I think it is possible that there will be no stimulus bill Mish, the two sides are so far apart even though as you point out both have some good ideas. I always thought that the $600 per week was far too generous on top of state UI that ranges up to $1,250 per week in Massachusetts. I mean the federal government thinks that $716 TOTAL is all your disabled vet needs per week, these unemployed are getting more than 100% disabled vets.
Here is the tangled path in my own mind as to DC’s thinking, we are now just 16 weeks from the election, the democrats in the house passed a new stimulus bill quite a while ago and the GOP in the senate has blocked it. In the minds of the democrats the GOP is what is blocking vital assistance to tens of millions of really scared people, those will vote against the GOP come November so it is in the political interest of the democrats to stand there and point fingers at the GOP.
I actually agree with the GOP on a few things here, the UI is far too much money and January 31 is too long to re authorize any money. But that will make no difference come election day.
There is now also a push on to give a lot of money to cities, counties, and states which the democrats want distributed out based upon population. That of course would greatly benefit blue regions because they are concentrated in urban areas. Meanwhile rural poor regions would get what feels like the shaft, even though it really is just a lesson in how much less those red regions have in the way of population, you might say a very hard nosed object lesson in just how much political power they have had relative to their population. Sort of like a reverse poll tax. They got a president elected via the EC in spite of being well outnumbered by democrats. When the money is distributed on a per capita basis they will see how much more power they have had on the same basis.
But I digress. There are two competing ideas that are really holding things up. On one side you have the idea that the lion’s share of the funds have to go to the hardest hit individuals and on the other you have the idea that it should go to all people no matter their circumstances so long as they are not already wealthy. One is an individual bailout based on need, the other is a bailout for the economy and not focused on need but on fairer distribution.
One thing is certain, millions of people have never even gotten their stimulus check from the first round yet, and clearly the IRS was not the way to go. It should have been done through social security which has a far broader database of names, addresses, and living arrangements in homes. The moment you start imposing conditions you introduce factors that just muddle everything. Billions start going out to dead people and billions do not go to those who need it.
If they do another round we should have the two sides agree that corporations should not be funded as the Fed has already given them more welfare than the entire population has gotten to date. If saving people from homelessness is the object, along with saving the economy in which people have to be spending on items above and beyond the meanest basic necessities, then the answer is simple, they would vote to give us a small UBI for 6 months. After which the party is over and everyone back to work. Say $2,000 per month per adult, and $500 per month extra per child. They will have to mean it though when they say 6 month only, so people will be encouraged to save as much as they can of that in case need goes beyond the 6 months, and that is compatible with stimulating the economy because the economy needs savings as well as consumer spending.
As pointed out below, in the most condescending and snide way possible, we could in fact turn every American into a millionaire, but in fact the Fed has pumped up the already rich top 10% with more money than the entire other 90% have gotten from the federal government, by a factor of at least three to one. So, as long as we have such magnificent largess for the very richest among us it will be seen by the other 90% as the straw that broke the camel’s back come election day when the republicans tell Americans the answer is to go get a job you lazy bums, stop worrying about dying of Covid and go get a minimum wage soul sucking job waiting on rich folks. AKA your betters.
This pandemic could not have been better timed to force the introduction of socialism as a UBI is very quickly gaining momentum. A third of people under 35 even say now they have a favorable view of communism. Makes sense since they have no idea what real communism even is, they are too young to remember. But if socialism does wiggle it’s way in, and the degree to which it does, at this point depends entirely upon the recalcitrance of the GOP to help the people of the 90% as opposed to the corporate owners of the 10%. Right now I would bet all I have that they will fuck it up monstrously. A little generosity and compassion would go a long way to staving off socialism right now, so get ready for socialism folks.
“I think it is possible that there will be no stimulus bill”
…
No way. It is an election year. SOMETHING will pass.
We will see. But you have to admit the public knows the democrats want to hand out stimulus and the GOP is blocking that in the senate, particularly Moscow Mitch. It plays into the democrats hand to have the GOP stonewall stimulus and I assure you during the last 8 weeks of political ads which is now only 8 weeks away, there will be a ton, no a metric tonne, of ads featuring the GOP refusal to debate or vote on the house stimulus package. That may go over well with the GOP hard core of about 35% of voters, but very few others. This may well be the single most epic wipe out for a political party since the Whigs went into the history books in 1854. If there was no schism in the GOP before this there will be now. And I think it could be a generational fracture that will leave the republicans unable to elect a dog catcher till they review and change their political policy in general.
It would only take a paltry 330 trillion bucks to make each and every American a fckn millionaire ……Let’s do it , YES YOU CAN !
Cmon’ on Trump! Drain the swamp.
Payroll Tax Holiday that becomes permanent. Should have done it immediately.
Non starter since that would be seen/felt as a gift to those who are working and do not need help. You can only get a payroll tax holiday if you are actually on a payroll which right now tens of millions are not. My brother who was making $165k per year would get to take home a lot more money, that is not going to do anything for the workers out of jobs who will benefit exactly zero from such a break.
If you combine the payroll tax holiday with holiday from all other activity taxes, for both businesses and individuals, there will be an awful lot fewer workers “out of a job.”
People are out of a job for a reason. That reason is that they are too expensive to employ. Lower all costs of employing them, and many fewer will meet that criteria.
In normal economics you would expect a tax cut to affect the labor market positvely wouldn’t you, except that has not been true now for decades. We have had tax cut after tax cut after tax cut and the labor market has been pretty unaffected by them all, we have even had the very best labor market in our history in the late 90’s after a tax increase.
But these are not normal times and most of the layoffs have been due to lockdowns rather than any economic reason. Though as this drags on and businesses fail in silence already closed the lost jobs will become economic rather than social/medical. At that point you might be right to demand tax cuts but, you will wait a very long time before that impacts the unemployment rate, years if ever.
In fact as I posted just last week the corporate effective tax rate is less than 6% now, the share of GDP paid to the government by business is now under 1.34%. So even if you do away with tax on all businesses at this point it would not have a dramatic effect on labor. What it would have is a dramatic effect on the owners of assets, ie the top 10 and mostly 1% of the nation by household wealth.
We may have had what the newspeakers refer to as a “tax cut” But we haven’t had a real one.
A real tax cut, means government spending drops. Heck, not just direct nominal government spending. But government mandated, and motivated, spending as well.
We haven’t had anything close to that for decades on end. Instead, more and more of spending, is either directed directly by government, or is in direct response to government policy and/or mandates. Meaning, it’s done inefficiently, and is destroying capital.
There’s no economic difference between the government collecting what it spends by way of a nominal taxman, or by way of a central bank printing money the government can then “borrow.” The only difference is a level of obfuscation to fool the less-than-all-that-bright. Economically, if government spending increases, effective taxation increases as well. Hence cost of doing business. Hence the labor “market” suffers.
Stuki, there have been a lot of changes that according to the textbooks SHOULD have resulted in much higher labor participation and lower unemployment, but that has not happened and I would argue that even when employment is high as the labor market was showing signs of prior to Covid, with labor conditions getting tight if not a historic level, even so wages were not good with the returns on labor fairly low.
When you say “A real tax cut, means government spending drops…” That is actually facetious, though I do not think you mean to intentionally allow political dogma get in the way of simple economic reality. Government spending has not dropped but it also has not increased, the tax bite on the economy by the federal government has remained static as a share of GDP.
I do not know in what major your degree is, assuming you have one, and I do because you always write so well and seem to be fairly well centered when it comes to finance and econ, but my degree is in Finance and one of the first terms we learned was a term called ceteris paribus; all things being equal in English. The tax bite for a number of reasons has actually fallen on the top 10% as a share of not only their incomes but of GDP even as their share of GDP per household has risen, so they can well afford the extra nominal taxes paid as well as tax rates paid.
Instead the spending has been financed via debt funded by the Fed lowering of the interest rates, when you carry 26+ TRILLION in debt that is a huge break in debt service payments. At a historic norm of about 5-6% interest rates in the economy to the best rated borrowers (and there are none better in ratings than the USA at least till recently) our debt service payments alone would be over $1 trillion per year. By lowering interest rates to historic lows the Fed has arranged for the federal debt to balloon without driving the federal debt service to unpayable levels.
But, who has more debt than the federal government? US corporations have multiples of federal debt. This interest rate break for them is what is driving the extreme and historic wealth inequality which like it or not has spawned riots and social discord that requires extreme police tactics to quell. The wealthy as well as the federal government are literally minting new money out of thin air by issuing debt that affects them nearly not at all. It is thus academic if some put that new wealth to good economic use or hoard it, the bottom line for anyone that can read a chart is that our economy has gone parabolic just as it did in Weimar Germany even if the full impact has yet to be seen, it will be soon enough. And it is NOT deflationary.
Let me amend that last statement, it is NOT deflationary at first, since all hyperinflations do come to an end with currency collapse it must end at some point in deflation and depression. That is why Zimbabwe now officially uses the US dollar as it’s currency.
The final point I want to make is that the labor market has seen it’s share of GDP (national income) as a REAL (meaning after REAL inflation) decline steadily for 50 years. Unemployment has risen and fallen many times in that 50 years, and while labors share of income has also gone up and down some the overall trend has been soundly down. Meanwhile, the ownership of assets has continually shrunk to fewer and fewer people, Jeffrey Epstein made more money in his last week in prison than any 20 of us will make in our entire lifetimes. COMBINED! Elon Musk made and lost more than 8 billion dollars yesterday off of share speculation.
So it seems to me the entire argument over wages and general employment conditions are not worth losing friends and allies over, labor is screwed no matter what and all Covid has done is condense a couple years worth of this falling share of income into a few months, we will start to return towards normal soon enough, but we will never get back to where we were in January, it will level off at a lower share of the economy than we had before in REAL terms. How much is a good question which nobody can possibly answer unless they have a crystal ball that allows them to read the future, but trends are clear, labor is totally screwed.
“The wealthy as well as the federal government are literally minting new money out of thin air by issuing debt that affects them nearly not at all. ”
And all that minting, is exactly as much a tax, as that which is collected by a nominal “taxman.” The difference is solely one of nomenclature. The net effect being exactly the same.
So, instead of taxes having been lowered; hey have gone through the roof. They’re just being increasingly collected by way of debasement now. And they are why labor demand is low.
In addition to debasement, taxes are now also collected by way of mandates etc. As well as by giving ambulance chasers and others the ability to use kangaroo courts to engage in their own taxation. As well as by a myriad other ways.
Economically, what matters is what share of someone’s output he is forced to hand over “control” over. The rest is, economically speaking, taxes. Calling it a “mandate” or “insurance”, is just Newspeak.
And, since money is not a good, but just a claim on real goods; it’s amount in circulation really is a zero-sum-game: Every penny printed up and handed to someone else, is a penny which has to be taken from those not handed that penny. Person A’s purchasing power, hence wealth, being increased by way of lowering rates making his house goes up; HAS TO, by simple arithmetic, result in other persons’ purchasing power, hence wealth, being reduced by that same amount. No different, AT ALL, from if the taxman directly taxed those other persons, and handed the funds directly, as a welfare check, to person A. Ergo, it’s a tax. Just a slightly obfuscated one, to keep the less-than-insightful from figuring out their true tax burden and revolting.
Add up all of that, and taxes are MUCH higher today than before. So there’s nothing wrong with textbook economics ( what they call micro-economics today. “Macro” is 100% dead, flat wrong, period; but that’s another story….) As always, things really aren’t any different today. They never are. At least not since the Big Bang. Instead, labor demand is down, entirely predictably, because taxes, defined economically, is up.
In Vail Co for the evening. Dead tired. of the way to our new home in Utah.
Welcome to Utah Mish. It’s going to be a hot one in the area you are going today.
Lots of nice country on the back range of Colorado, too.
I like greenery too much.
Amazing how much you are able to post while moving. Of course, driving along the Platte River is amazingly flat for miles and miles, and not much to see. 😉
(There are actually scenic places in Nebraska you could photograph, just not from I-80. One of the best is down by the river itself, which is “a mile wide and an inch deep”, and teeming with life. The other place would be NW Nebraska, in the Sandhills.)
Welcome to the west. You will wonder why you didnt move sooner.
So Mish tell us what we REALLY want to know; will you be taking “sister wives?” And will your current wife murder you in your sleep for even thinking it?
How about a pay-per-view of everybody in government the past 40 years committing hari kari?
How about we limit it to the Trump administration?
Why swim around in the sewer picking favorites among the turds?
Trump is just the currently most visible symptom. It’s turds all the way down.
So you have to pay for people to go into lockdown because otherwise they will take to the streets demanding why the borders weren’t closed earlier and some sensible plan of action put into place to mitigate any possible outbreak. Well OK, that’s the US and various other countries.
Meanwhile in france there was a large procession in tribute to a bus driver who had the life beaten out of him for trying to get a passenger to wear a mask. Notice something odd about the image of that (and not that they are all dressed in white, whatever reason that is for) ?
Maybe surreal is the new normal now, but it’s too senseless to keep track of.
Maybe they are protesting the obligatory use of masks and fault that for what occured? In Spain more and more regions are making masks obligatory, at the same time the brit tourists are back, and football crowds …
In Cataluña new cases were over 800 today, going on towards half the previous peak of 2000 per day during lockdown. The locality of Segria is sealed (with 200 attempts of “escape” reported a day), and they are talking of sealing off Lleida, even locking down Cataluña. Primary care services are said overwhelmed and dysfunctional in that locality. Various other regions of Spain are seeing the start of increases in cases, the number of concurrent outbreaks continually rising. Fatalities remain low for now though. I’ll have a look at Portugal, France and Italy now to see what is going on there….lazy afternoon might as well do some reporting :/ .
In france they are noting an increase in cases across the territory without exception , the paris region increasing the most by 22% weekly. Number of people reporting symptoms increased by an even higher %, and the share of those with symptoms but not reporting them was around half. leparisien
In Portugal there is a continuing outbreak around Lisbon which is keeping infections tracking higher than their lows. Slight increases in other regions also from lows. observador and various
In Italy they seem to have kept cases low for now, except Lombardy which had a new outbreak that seems like being contained. The state of emergency is likely to be extended there, even though many restrictions are lifted. Flights from various countries are suspended, most recently from Bangladesh because of high number of infected arriving. Corriere della sera and thelocal .
A lot of Africa and near east / western asia have increasing epidemic.
“The locality of Segria is sealed (with 200 attempts of “escape” reported a day), and they are talking of sealing off Lleida, even locking down Cataluña.”
The CCP seem able to pull that sort of doing-it-backwards thing off, but they have many more resources at their disposal than most by now.
Sealing off, is more efficiently done by local militias sealing others out, rather than a centralized government sealing people in. The end result may theoretically be the same, but people, at least the decent ones, are simply much more motivated to defend their own neighborhood, than to imprison others in theirs.
As an aside, from what I’m hearing, Social distancing and mask wearing, is taken very lightly in the Balearics. Sounds like the mentality is “all our income comes from summer tourism. We can’t lose that; so we’ll take our chances and, worst come to worst, try to get contagion back under control by locking down come fall, until next summer….”
Most activity is outdoors in high humidity and direct sunlight, and there are fewer tourists than usual, but it still sounds like a bit of a gamble. I personally also suspect people, even families, staying closer together in hotel rooms and vacation rentals, than they usually do in their houses at home, meaningfully increases the exposure they subject themselves to (each family member couching viruses back and forth…). The Chinese early on noticed a large overweight of family clusters… But the Chinese then brought things under control so quickly, that all investigations came to an end from lack of infecteds.
I guess Med season really is use-it-or-lose-it, can’t put it off. And local economies, as well as “everyone has July off European vacationers” are so singularly dependent on those summer months, that many are willing to risk it.
They are getting stricter and stricter on mask wearing, including Baleares, but I don’t think they can police it if they had to. It can be made a bit of a norm and the fines are high, but really if people are not behind it then it just becomes a joke because they soon learn how and where to avoid wearing masks. Crowds are a good example, the police won’t approach a soccer crowd or a bunch of tourists to detain a few, which is why we have seen quite harsh dispersal in the past, before the epidemic. Spain is in an odd circumstance because of Cataluña and other regionalism, I think there is already a clash of authority over setting the pandemic standards going on. So you have Cataluña parliament claiming authority and basically closing out Spain, but now also closing in Lleida/Lerida, and you have basques with a similar view, and andalucia is just confused and corrupt, and you have a left wing government that is all over the place, in theory sympathetic to regionalism but also only a weak coalition with its strings pulled from various places, even the monarchy is under attack for corruption, plus you have EU attaching economic oversight now to any bailout, plus the far left going UBI, and the further right starting up a fee-less union to compensate for the failed psoe ones, and with unions being one of the main ways traditionally to raise political protest. There is much more going on as well but in short the country is now very unstable, and into the future. Personally I think they blew it, the eighties and early nineties it was a great balance and the country was lively and busy and making itself more or less sensibly, not too fast. Then the euro and they boomed and binged on twenty years of activity compressed into five, and the rest is history on a tread wheel going nowhere just trying to keep the country together. Many Spanish I know are unhappy at all this.
“Then the euro and they boomed and binged on twenty years of activity compressed into five, and the rest is history on a tread wheel going nowhere”
The same thing happened in the US in the 80s. Unless you paid attention, things gave the superficial impression of being OK for awhile, but all that was only on account of insane debt expansion. So you had people thinking they were “saving” and, the buzzword of financialization, “investing”, while in reality, every penny of value created, and then some, was consumed.
There never was any savings. Only empty promises. And now the country is being torn apart, by those who freely handed their retirement savings to be consumed by Wall Street leeches and “home owners”, insisting the because they stupidly and naively gave away part of their salary to conmen to be burned, government should therefore shake down and rob other people’s kids to “make them whole” again….
To me, it looks as if Spain got the same treatment, just to an even greater degree, once Franco was done with. Every pathology which have destroyed the rest of the West, seems to have been turbocharged and compressed in Spain, as it, in a few years, went from a closed, almost agrarian, part Catholic and part nominally fascist society, to a rudderless ward of the ECB and the money printing beneficiaries (The latter being no no improvement on the former….)
The rest of Europe, at least started off the Euro disaster with some existing industry. Spain never had any, on account of the isolation under Franco. So instead of the printing-beneficiary welfare queens burning and destroying existing industrial capital, as they’ve done in the rest of The West, all Spain was able to post as make-believe “collateral” for the systemic robbery, was access to sun and sea and the occasional ham and chorizo.
Even by standards as degenerate as California’s, Spain has been living off of nothing but real property sales and the pretense that houses are somehow “going up”. As there was never really anything else there. America had world beating industry to destroy, part out and hand to the leeches. Spain did not.
Only upside, was that neither were there much in the way of even built property there at the end of the Franco era. So that Spain’s version of the “great property swindle” at a minimum was much more construction-centric than it was in the US and many other countries. A bit more like Japan’s version, where it was construction companies who were being handed the loot. And, even if a lot of what was built was bridges to nowhere, at least they built something in exchange for the loot. Not a mathematical hard zero nothing , as has been the case in California, and much of the US.
So you still have good civil engineering in Spain. It’s amazing how good the infrastructure really is, for a country which darned near never had a competitive factory producing anything, and where the geography in may places are far from easy on builders. Aside from in the very centers of Madrid and Barcelona, and a few areas immediately surrounding the ritziest of Sun Coast resorts, property and rent is still not that far out of whack compared to local salaries. I’m sure there are no shortage of useless, deadweight, welfare funded NIMBY leeches trying their hardest to make their countrymens children homeless in Spain as well; but at least they are balanced out politically by a mass-employing, and fairly competent, construction industry, which lobbies specifically to build where there is a market for it.
Wouldn’t an effective coordinated response been better–masks, distancing, testing, tracing etc–all embraced wholeheartedly from the top down? Quick shut-down, a period of intensive preparation, and re-engagement with life? Cheaper? Better for jobs and the economy? WTF sort of incompetence is being tolerated here?
We are destroying the economy with wishful thinking and politics.
We are stumbling our way into another 6 months of pain….
CNN)Internal documents from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned that fully reopening K-12 schools and universities would be the “highest risk” for the spread of coronavirus, according to a New York Times report, as President Donald Trump and his administration push for students and teachers to return in-person to classrooms.
The 69-page document obtained by the Times marked “For Internal Use Only” was among materials for federal public health response teams deployed to coronavirus hotspots to help local public health officials handle the outbreak, the newspaper reported.
The document was circulated this week, the Times reported, as Trump slammed the CDC guidelines around reopening schools and he, Vice President Mike Pence and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos increased their pressure on schools to fully reopen by the fall.
It depends: How much livestock do they have left in the nursing homes to sacrifice this keep this big corporate commercial running? Ya gotta have big complicated numbers to keep the sheep in line.
Hey, I heard you were throwing a party this weekend…
No, the big party here was a month ago.
Out-of-work you hire me, while out-of-work me hire you. We pay each other from the paychecks we get from the US gov’s printing press. Hey. Works for me. 🙂 Hmmm. That would be a great way to improve the productivity of people on Social Security!
Then we hook a generator to Keynes’s corpse.
i agree with above sentiment. whichever deal gives the most to the most connected big corporations and bankers will get passed. this is amerika. we don’t care about actual quality of life of the majority of humans. we care about business.
The business of America is business. Workers are simply collateral damage.
Not business. Simple rackets.
If “America” cared about business, it wouldn’t saddle those still naive enough to bother having a go at it, with the cost of keeping an entire deadweight, rent seeking “asset owning/profiteering” class flush, in exchange for them doing, nor comprehending, exactly nothing.
American government promotes public unions, banksters and idle rent seekers. None of which have anything whatsoever to do with business. Hence why American business cannot even compete with competitors in communist countries anymore.
And hence why the highest earnings across the board in the US today, now all goes to know-nothing, create nothing, do-nothing idle mediocrities on “Wall Street”, at “Hedge funds”, “PE”, “VCs” and similar dead-weights who do nothing but collect Fed welfare, instead of to people who can read, count and do other at least potentiality productive work.
Caring about business A, translates directly to getting out of the way. Of business A for sure, but also of every other business, which indirectly ends up supplying and supporting A.
It means not taxing business, and not taxing their employees. And not preventing building of more space. Nothing kills and hamstrings a bootstapped business quicker than excessive rent, in virtally every city in the US. For the US to have any hope of becoming competitive again, rents need to become cheap as heck. Such that space is cheap enough that all employees can live 5 minutes from work, and business models are as little saddled with the necessity to minimize space use as possible.
It means not increasing the cost of US companies, by forcing them to pay “tarriffs” and other nonsense which foreign competitors don’t pay.
And it means not robbing productive business by way of debasement, in order to then turn around and hand the loot to idle, deadweight idiots who will then bid up the price of assets business could otherwise afford to employ productively.
IOW, it means not doing any, as in literally not any, of the stuff American government has been doing to an ever greater degree ever since 1880.
The pandemic was shutting things down before any government mandate. And as long as there is a pandemic things won’t really come back no matter how hard Trump blows at it.
The plandemic was a handy smokescreen for the big Federal Reserve fail. It’s all been a big TV show now. Keep in tune for the next trick.
Jobs? LOL. Nobody cares about those.
Whichever bill provides the most benefits to corporate sponsors will pass. That’s it, full stop.