Yeah. How many of them will be afford that COBRA shiite?
COBRA had me on the run (years back) for almost a year when I was out of work. I was hustling money fast as I could. Thank God no one became ill b/c yes it was a shiite policy, a modern day version of Payday loans who’s business model is, exploit, exploit, exploit.
And Austan Goolsbee said last week that there’s a possible silver lining in that. Since this is not a traditional collapse, it’s conceivable that the recovery could be very rapid – once the virus is defeated.
I believe he and Krugman have both said that there’s zero chance the economic situation will improve until the pandemic is “past.”
I never for ONE SECOND faulted Trump’s Base. I faulted the sleepyheads and the Sarandons.
Racism in the United States is much less than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. I have numbers to show it. If you are not into numbers, take the easy way to look at it, try watching a 1960s and 1970s film and try to avoid cringing
What happened was Reagan, FOX, Gingrich and other agents pouring gasoline on a flame which has always been a bugaboo for us.
It would have been smarter to have done what Denmark and some other countries did. Instead of unemployment, provide payroll support (say at 90% of previous earnings). In other words keep workers on the payroll with the government providing the cash so that when things open up again, they can go right back to work. In the meantime, if the employer is shut down as non-essential, they can have the workers take on tasks that can help the community in general.
Get a load of this:
A train engineer at the Port of LA intentionally tried to crash his train into the USNS Mercy at harbor-side. He told police he had to prevent a government takeover that used COVID19 as an excuse for a power grab.
This is the kind of stochastic terrorism that Trump has directly inspired, just like the death threats against Fauci.
Totally agree. What you just said plus the election and re-election of America’s first (and perhaps only) Black POTUS.
And here we are.
Oh, good Lord, he’ll just use this as an example of his greatness… LOL!!!
Shades of insanity.
And supported by the RW media, who still won’t accept even their own role, much less Trump’s, in this spreading pandemic.
Blood on their hands, all of 'em.
Price is now $15 for just a kit. Apparently the law of supply and demand has not been revoked.
ETA: Robert Klein once explained the law of supply and demand this way:
We have the supply, sooooo we can demand whatever the fuck we want.
Yeah, he’s probably locked on the horns of a dilemma — “do I play it bigger: more unemployed than with any other president! numbers you’ve never seen before!! or do I play it smaller, like cheating at golf??*”
Poor Donnie: decisions, decisions.
More shades of insanity.
One thing that really worries me is that a lot of independent news orgs will not survive this. No doubt, some wealthy benefactors will offer a lifeline, capturing more media outlets and subverting them.
It’s not gonna look like media consolidation. Small orgs will just quietly get new owners, and then those new owners will steer the fourth estate rightward. By the time their audience figures it out, they’ll already have been deprived of info, and misled into electing more Republican tools.
Makes you wonder what they are putting in the koolaid these days…
Rev. Baker’s Silver Solution.
Liquid Hate, an age old additive…
And Austan Goolsbee said last week that there’s a possible silver lining in that. Since this is not a traditional collapse, it’s conceivable that the recovery could be very rapid – once the virus is defeated.
That is the general consensus but recently I’ve heard a few economists rethinking the outcome. they see a V shaped recovery b/c demand is still strong and consumers will jump back in and spend once a vaccine is put into use. But now they’re not so sure, saying it all depends on the level of damage done to the economy and the time it takes to recover. It might be a much slower process and change our consuming culture completely. So many eerie and scary possibilities.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this, too, especially as regards food production. It’s been designed for efficiency (and, thus, cheap food), but an event like this reveals its vulnerabilities: something like 90% of our domestic fruits and vegetables come from California; over 90% of cropland in Iowa is planted in either corn or soybeans (most of that to be consumed by cattle and hogs and ethanol plants instead of people). And only, what, about 2% or 3% of the population is involved in food production, and just around here in Wichita, thousands and thousands of acres of what was once farmland sits vacant, waiting for developers to come along and just snatch it up (which hasn’t been happening for several years now, and now really ain’t gonna happen).
Wendell Berry (a farmer and writer in Kentucky) has been writing about the depopulating of farming regions (and the national devaluing of the people who do that work and/or live in those areas) since the '70s. Efficiencies are all well and good, but they come at the (long-term) expenses of the dignity of people and, on down the road, the very fertility of the soil (increased mechanization has contributed to topsoil loss). His constant refrain is that we can still feed ourselves as a nation if we valued smaller-scale, more localized forms of farming, if cities did more to promote food production in or near their limits, etc. This all would require a massive shift in our collective thinking and in policy that’s been established since the end of WWII.
Something like this pandemic might encourage a re-thinking of how we feed ourselves.