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Comment by ianleeclark | Hacker News Reader

> First, the situation is not that dire to start with, most people and businesses can meet their obligations.

76% of americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Regardless of if you like it or not, a time will come when massive amounts of rents aren't paid. It can either fully immiserate the economy (most likely course of action), or it can be paused.

> the markets simply won't function at all even on a purely basic level

Can we please stop pretending that this zombie market we've propped up since 2008 works? If you like markets, then you shouldn't agree with the fact that the government can effectively be held hostage every decade or so due to "too big to fail."

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That day is coming April 1st. The unemployment numbers will come out soon. April 1st will be bad, but May 1st will be terrible. There will be millions of Americans unable to pay for basic necessities. The money from the stimulus will go to rent-seeking and basic necessities.

I am very thankful to still be working.

Ditto. HN is going to be highly irregular in that regard -- a lot of programmers and engineers (and similar desk worker types) who can work from home and still pick up full paychecks. The rest of the world ain't like that.

> 76% of americans live paycheck-to-paycheck. Regardless of if you like it or not, a time will come when massive amounts of rents aren't paid. It can either fully immiserate the economy (most likely course of action), or it can be paused.

And not all of these 76% of Americans are going to lose their jobs. Many people will, many others will have benefits, some others will be able to tighten their belts to make it work. And we can also just give everyone $$$ to ease the transition..

> Can we please stop pretending that this zombie market we've propped up since 2008 works? If you like markets, then you shouldn't agree with the fact that the government can effectively be held hostage every decade or so due to "too big to fail."

My definition of not working here isn't about some people getting unfairly rich at the expense of others. Literally people won't be able to get basic stuff at all. Entire supply chains will collapse since they are based on credit. You can't buy and sell at scale - these all involve contracts and payments. Credit isn't just about lending money for interest.

Let's also not forget that what's being proposed here is a TBTF argument. The argument here is that letting a bunch of small businesses that don't have enough saved up to survive a few months of no revenue go under is going to be so bad for the economy that we have to literally suspend the enforcement of contracts more generally to save them. Of course, if this is actually the case, we could just bail out the affected businesses instead of saying goodbye to the system of contracts more generally. And I don't believe we in such a situation yet either. We can probably just let them fail. Most small businesses are very replaceable and failure rates are very high to begin with.

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