The Economy

COVID, the financial bonanza.

Talk to the 3,000 people at the plant near me who were furloughed for two months.

I was only furloughed three weeks, but hours were cut to two to three days a week as we ran out of parts for months.

The people who actually build real physical things in this country would’ve collapsed.

Your mailman, your Amazon driver, your nurses, the guy who builds the steering wheel of your car kept going in.

People who work from home never understood how close we were to utter collapse. We kept going in during the worst. We got COVID. Our thanks? Told we don’t exist.

Go fly a kite.

 

Boy, howdy ... truer words were never pecked out.

 

I'm talking about the people who DIDN'T miss a paycheck getting money. But you knew that.

 

Of the world's largest economies, the US has been the one whose growth now exceeds the 2019 pre-covid trendline. Without the aid packages, Americans would not be complaining about high prices or the deficit. They'd be complaining about double-digit unemployment, a shortage of basic necessities and materials, and the collapse of their financial portfolios. But people never think about counterfactuals. Hard enough to think about the facts on the ground.

 

And that's great --- as long as a $33 trillion debt doesn't matter.

I keep thinking it has to at some point. But I thought that about $19 trillion ago, too.

 

jackpot!

 

I tried several times to decline the “tax rebates.”

I would’ve had to quit my job in order to comb through all the gobbledygook to figure out exactly how to do that, so I just gave up.

 

You've probably spent more thanks to inflation from all the money sloshing around than you received in rebates, so no need to decline them.

 

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/...o-far-the-recovery-has-helped-them-the-least/

The recession associated with the COVID-19 pandemic announced itself in spring 2020 with head-spinning job losses: 22 million lost jobs within two months, a shock that is hard to overstate.


https://www.povertycenter.columbia.edu/news-internal/2020/covid-lost-income-new-yorkers

https://www.cbpp.org/research/pover...covid-19-economys-effects-on-food-housing-and

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/14/40p...ost-their-jobs-in-march-according-to-fed.html

 

I think the 33 trillion dollar debt is starting to bite the country in the ass. The 19 trillion dollar deficit did not because interest rates were basically zero and there was little cost to the government of borrow. But now interest rates have increased and it is a very costly to finance the debt.

I think Biden's rebate was a mistake. It was unnecessary and added to inflation, though I think supply disruptions after COVID had a lot to do with the spike in inflation. But inflation is running at three percent a year so the harmful effects of that stimulus have largely passed. I think the stimulus that was pumped into the economy in the middle of COVID was necessary to keep the economy from falling apart. .

I also think the Trump tax cuts were a mistake. They only marginally increased the economic growth rate at a time when the economy was doing OK. But they reduced the revenue base of the government.

 

Depends on who is paying. Blue Cross will pay much less. The uninsured will likely be the only ones who pay list price. That's backward as hell, but it's our system.

 

The latest monthly inflation rate was closer to 4 percent and was flat after a few months in which it rose.