COVID Economy

[Hards Alumni]

This. So obviously, brazenly political, right down to the suddenly enthusiastic support of the extra stimulus from Georgia's GOP senators.

yuppepperoni

[Jockey]

With McConnell blocking a vote on $2000 stimulus checks, after sufficient votes to pass it in the Senate, it should be clear to everyone who is blocking economic support.

McConnell and his cronies are doing everything they can to block any support for the average American.

I’ve been saying this for 6 months.

[Hards Alumni]

I’ve been saying this for 6 months.

What is hilarious is that he is just doing the bidding of the party.  He is the scapegoat, and he is happy to do it.   Everyone can 'blame' him all they want, but at any point the majority in the senate could remove him as their leader.

But they won't, and they don't.  He catches the heat, and the 'moderate' Republicans get to deflect, furl their brows, and clutch their pearls... and it is 100% for show.  These moderates are fully on board with the plan because its all for show.  And people buy it.  Mitch McConnell is the ultimate cover man.  People need a serious lesson in civics.  He could be removed TOMORROW if the GOP truly wasn't happy with what he is doing.

But they're all on board, and people will continue to fall for this crap because they have no clue how anything works.

[shoothoops]

Omni Hotels received $76 million in PPP loans, but it didn't use the money to pay its workers:

https://www.npr.org/2020/12/29/950902403/omni-hotels-accepted-millions-in-ppp-funds-but-didnt-pay-workers

[MU82]

McConnell today:

"The Senate is not going to split apart the three issues that President Trump linked together just because Democrats are afraid to address two of them. The Senate is not going to be bullied into rushing out more borrowed money into the hands of the Democrats' rich friends who don't need the help. We just approved almost $1 trillion in aid a few days ago. It struck a balance between broad support for all kinds of households and a lot more targeted relief for those who need help most."

Outstanding job avoiding the fact that it is Trump who suggested the $2,000, who threatened to veto the stimulus bill over the $2,000 and who is still aggressively pushing for the $2,000. And it was Trump who called the bill (now the legislation) that McConnell is lauding "a disgrace."

But yeah ... blame the Dems.

Hate him or hate him more, he's good at his job.

[tower912]

Masters of messaging and misdirection.

[jesmu84]

I learned that senate procedure allows for any individual senator to bring a bill to the floor.

So Hawley, Sanders or anyone else could bring a clean $2k bill by themselves.

(Please correct any misunderstandings I have)

[Frenns Liquor Depot]

I learned that senate procedure allows for any individual senator to bring a bill to the floor.

So Hawley, Sanders or anyone else could bring a clean $2k bill by themselves.

(Please correct any misunderstandings I have)

Anyone can block it too

[Jockey]

I learned that senate procedure allows for any individual senator to bring a bill to the floor.

So Hawley, Sanders or anyone else could bring a clean $2k bill by themselves.

(Please correct any misunderstandings I have)

Yes, they can bring it TO the floor, but...

To consider a bill on the floor, the Senate (as a whole) first must agree to bring it UP – typically by agreeing to a unanimous consent request or by voting to adopt a motion to proceed to the bill.


So they could bring a clean bill to the floor, but the 1st vote is over whether to consider the bill - not voting on the actual bill itself. That is why, even though the House has passed several hundred bills, the Senate never even has a vote on them.

[jesmu84]

Yes, they can bring it TO the floor, but...

To consider a bill on the floor, the Senate (as a whole) first must agree to bring it UP – typically by agreeing to a unanimous consent request or by voting to adopt a motion to proceed to the bill.


So they could bring a clean bill to the floor, but the 1st vote is over whether to consider the bill - not voting on the actual bill itself. That is why, even though the House has passed several hundred bills, the Senate never even has a vote on them.

Thanks for the clarification.

So couldn't they bring a clean bill to floor and see who says "no" to voting on it? Wouldn't that, in effect, be voting on the bill itself? Who is going to vote for a senator who wouldn't even be willing to vote for a bill that a significant portion of the public supports?

[Frenns Liquor Depot]

Thanks for the clarification.

So couldn't they bring a clean bill to floor and see who says "no" to voting on it? Wouldn't that, in effect, be voting on the bill itself? Who is going to vote for a senator who wouldn't even be willing to vote for a bill that a significant portion of the public supports?

One person can block it and that person is MM right now. 

[Jockey]

One person can block it and that person is MM right now.

Yup. He has blocked hundreds of bills in the last 2 years.

[GooooMarquette]

Yup. He has blocked hundreds of bills in the last 2 years.

And a Supreme Court justice in 2016....

[MU82]

Yup. He has blocked hundreds of bills in the last 2 years.

It's the third stimulus bill that the House passed easily but MM never let the Senate vote on. This one has by far the most bipartisan support.

[MU82]

Interesting report on the economy from the NYT (I bolded two paragraphs for emphasis) ...

The central, befuddling economic reality of the United States at the close of 2020 is that everything is terrible in the world, while everything is wonderful in the financial markets.

It’s a macabre spectacle. Asset prices keep reaching new, extraordinary highs, when around 3,000 people a day are dying of the coronavirus and 800,000 people a week are filing new unemployment claims. Even an enthusiast of modern capitalism might wonder if something is deeply broken in how the economy works.

To better understand this strange mix of buoyant markets and economic despair, it is worth turning to the data. As it happens, the numbers offer a coherent narrative about how the United States arrived at this point – one with lessons about how policy, markets and the economy intersect – and reveal the sharp disparity between the pandemic year’s haves and have-nots.

It starts, as so many epic tales do, with a table of data from the National Income and Product Accounts – namely, “Personal Income and Its Disposition, Monthly.”

This report captures how Americans are earning and spending, two activities that the coronavirus drastically altered in 2020. By combining the numbers from March through November (the latest available) and comparing them with the same period in 2019, we can see more clearly the pandemic’s whipsaw effects.

The first important observation: Salaries and wages fell less, in the aggregate, than even a careful observer of the economy might think. Total employee compensation was down only 0.5% for those nine months, more akin to a mild recession than an economic catastrophe.

That might seem impossible. Large swaths of the economy have been shut down; millions are out of work. The number of jobs employers reported having on their payrolls was down 6.1% in November compared with a year earlier, according to separate Labor Department data.

So how can the number of jobs be down 6% but employee compensation be down only 0.5%? It has to do with which jobs have been lost. The millions of people no longer working because of the pandemic were disproportionately in lower-paying service jobs. Higher-paying professional jobs were more likely to be unaffected, and a handful of other sectors have been booming, such as warehousing and grocery stores, leading to higher incomes for those workers.

The arithmetic is as simple as it is disorienting. If a corporate executive gets a $100,000 bonus for steering a company through a difficult year, while four $25,000-per-year restaurant workers lose their jobs entirely, the net effect on total compensation is zero – even though in human terms a great deal of pain has been incurred.

So wages, salaries and other forms of workers’ compensation dropped only a little – $43 billion over the nine months – despite mass unemployment. But there is more to the story.

For all the attacks on the coronavirus relief bill that Congress passed in late March, the degree to which it served to support the incomes of Americans, especially those who lost jobs, is extraordinary.

Americans’ income from unemployment insurance benefits was 25 times higher from March through November 2020 than in the same period of 2019. That partly reflects that millions more jobless people were seeking benefits, of course. But it also reflects a $600 weekly supplement to jobless benefits that the act included through late July – along with a program to support freelance and contract workers who lost jobs and who otherwise would have been ineligible for benefits.

In total, unemployment insurance programs pumped $499 billion more into Americans’ pockets from March to November than the previous year; $365 billion of it was a result of the expansion in the coronavirus relief bill.

The $1,200 checks to most U.S. households that were included in that legislation contributed a further $276 billion to personal income – much of which accrued to families that did not experience a drop in earnings.

And the law’s signature program to encourage businesses to keep people on their payrolls, the Paycheck Protection Program, prevented a collapse in “proprietor’s income” – profits that accrued to owners of businesses and farms. This income rose narrowly, by $29 billion, but would have fallen by $143 billion if not for the PPP and a coronavirus food assistance program.

These are remarkable numbers. When it’s all tallied up, Americans’ cumulative after-tax personal income was $1.03 trillion higher from March to November of 2020 than in 2019, an increase of more than 8%. Some of the pessimism among economic forecasters (and journalists) in the spring reflected a failure to understand just how large and influential those stimulus payments would turn out to be.

By turning to another riveting story, “Personal Consumption Expenditures by Major Type of Product, Monthly,” we see a pattern that may seem obvious with hindsight but was not as easy to predict while the economy was collapsing during the spring.

The obvious part was a decline in spending on services. All those restaurant reservations never made, flights not taken, and sports and concert tickets not bought added up to serious money. Services spending fell by $575 billion, or nearly 8%.

[The Hippie Satan of Hyperbole]

Thanks 82. This shows that the relief bill was hugely important, and the next one will be the same. And it supports my assertion that the enhanced unemployment is WAY more important than the $600 stimulus. That is what needs to be kept and enhanced.

[MU82]

Thanks 82. This shows that the relief bill was hugely important, and the next one will be the same. And it supports my assertion that the enhanced unemployment is WAY more important than the $600 stimulus. That is what needs to be kept and enhanced.

I totally agree. There have been numerous studies showing that unemployment payments are the single best stimulus available to Americans. Those who receive those payments are highly likely to turn right around and put the money into the economy for crazy things like food, shelter, clothing, utilities, etc.

"Stimulus" money going to those who don't need unemployment payments very often goes into savings or investing. There's nothing wrong with saving and investing; everybody should do it. But it doesn't stimulate the economy, especially in the short-term. Which is the whole idea of "economic stimulus."

It would have been foolhardy to give every man, woman and child $2,000 cash. The Dems were for it because, well, they're Dems. And Trump and select Republicans were for it because it was a brazen political ploy that would have helped them in the short term.

[jesmu84]

Does that imply that the countries who gave regular pandemic economic payments to its citizens is doing the wrong thing?

[The Hippie Satan of Hyperbole]

Does that imply that the countries who gave regular pandemic economic payments to its citizens is doing the wrong thing?

Yeah I think so.  By and large, the US economy fared better in 2020 than Europe did.  Giving people money who don't need it isn't stimulating an economy that is largely shut down.  As 82 mentioned, those people are sticking it in savings accounts or paying down debt.

Giving money to those who are unemployed, and to small business owners to help maintain payroll, seem to be better economic "stimulation" than just cutting checks to everyone.

[jesmu84]

Yeah I think so.  By and large, the US economy fared better in 2020 than Europe did.  Giving people money who don't need it isn't stimulating an economy that is largely shut down.  As 82 mentioned, those people are sticking it in savings accounts or paying down debt.

Giving money to those who are unemployed, and to small business owners to help maintain payroll, seem to be better economic "stimulation" than just cutting checks to everyone.

Okay.

What about a slight pivot here. What if we're not talking about "economic stimulus"? What if we're talking about people who lost their jobs or took pay cuts directly as a result of government mandated shutdowns? Should they be made whole or more whole by direct government support?

[Frenns Liquor Depot]

Yeah I think so.  By and large, the US economy fared better in 2020 than Europe did.  Giving people money who don't need it isn't stimulating an economy that is largely shut down.  As 82 mentioned, those people are sticking it in savings accounts or paying down debt.

Giving money to those who are unemployed, and to small business owners to help maintain payroll, seem to be better economic "stimulation" than just cutting checks to everyone.

I wasn’t aware that Europe cut checks to everyone.  I am aware that they have very strong unemployment support.  What countries were you referring to?

[The Hippie Satan of Hyperbole]

Okay.

What about a slight pivot here. What if we're not talking about "economic stimulus"? What if we're talking about people who lost their jobs or took pay cuts directly as a result of government mandated shutdowns? Should they be made whole or more whole by direct government support?

Isn't that what the enhanced unemployment benefits are doing?

[jesmu84]

Isn't that what the enhanced unemployment benefits are doing?

Not for those still employed (but took a pay cut, reduced hours, etc), afaik.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

[Galway Eagle]

Not for those still employed (but took a pay cut, reduced hours, etc), afaik.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

Also those who work majority on commission right now. Cant imagine many restaurants and other shops are signing up for marketing businesses like Yelp or Google Ads right now meaning lots of entry sales people are living off crap base pay.

[The Hippie Satan of Hyperbole]

Not for those still employed (but took a pay cut, reduced hours, etc), afaik.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

If you are working reduced hours you can collect unemployment under the rules from March. Not sure if that continues under the new law.