We are facing an incredibly grim future. Our health experts are making clear that millions of Americans could die if we do not implement strict social distancing measures now, and keep them in place for two or more months. We are watching with horror as the number of dead climb each day in Italy and Spain, wondering whether we’ll start to see something similar in New York or Miami. We are counting the days until someone we know is affected, and soon we will be counting the days until someone we know will have died. Days seem like weeks as we pour through a non-stop deluge of bad news. But, days are not weeks. We are only in the beginning stage of a months-long battle against Covid-19.
In the midst of this agony is another painful reality. Our economists are calculating that taking such steps could result in a decline of more than 10% of U.S. GDP this year. The Los Angeles Times released a poll showing that 18% of U.S. workers have either lost their job or had reduced hours since the virus hit. The State of Connecticut reports 30,000 first-time claims for jobless benefits, which is 10x higher than normal. And, the social distancing measures really only began early last week. Within two weeks, these numbers will skyrocket. Within three weeks, debt defaults will be routine on car and home loans. Within five weeks, many Americans will be wondering how to pay for food.
Our country is already poor and malnourished. Our healthcare system is already inefficient. Donald Rumsfeld once said that you “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” We go to war with this global pandemic with the country we have, and it’s now too late to take the steps necessary to make it more resilient. However, it’s not too late to respond. We need to treat this as an unprecedented economic and health emergency. Instead of UI benefits and sick leave, we need to be thinking about what it will take to keep Americans alive, housed, and fed. Think big, and then double it.
- Send $2,000 to every adult, and $500 for every kid every month until the crisis and its economic impact is over.
- Place a national moratorium on payments for all car loans, home mortgages, student loans, and small business commercial loans until the crisis and its economic impact is over.
- Expand Medicare to cover every American during the crisis so that no one has to pay a single medical bill to receive health care.
- Bailout American corporations. The airline industry (or hospitality industry) may be rapacious and greedy, but their greed and rapaciousness did not cause this crisis. We need to get the most at-risk companies through this period without having them implode, because if they implode now, the cost to fix them will be ten times higher when the pandemic has passed (and unemployment will continue for much longer).
Finally, and most importantly, we must be creative. Waiting two months to set up the program and another month to mail out the first checks isn’t acceptable. Things need to be done that people said couldn’t be done. Set up direct deposits. Authorize local post offices or banks as distributors. Get money to people ASAP. Do not wait for the creaky wheels of the federal bureaucracy to do what’s been done before. Do it now, and do it in a way that’s creative. Does the federal government lack authority to place a moratorium on loan payments? Who fucking cares. Do it, and let the Supreme Court figure out whether it was constitutional two years from now.