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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that people can’t hibernate. All of the employees, all along the chain, need to eat.

There is no shortage of food at the moment. Just pay people to stay home.

until what?

You can do that, but then the system's not really in hibernation; you've just replaced it with a temporary UBI. There's no reason to expect the transition back to a normal market economy to be particularly smooth.

A rocky transition from a temporary UBI to normalcy is better than thousands upon thousands of small businesses permanently closing across the country.

My point is, I'd expect a transition from temporary UBI to normalcy to also involve a lot of small business closures.

Right, so the government needs to cover the costs. That's what the Paycheck Protection Program was trying to do, but it wasn't expansive enough and now it has run out.

Some companies collected those loans and still didn't pay employees. I've seen this unfold personally too and it has really shaken my respect for American businessmen...

Every business owner is a cute mom-n-pop, just makin' ends meet, we're a family here, don't think of me as your boss type of boss during a bull market. When the chips are down, less so.

If the loans weren't used to cover payroll, then they'll have to pay the money back to the government.

And, they may have decided that covering e.g. rent was actually more important, since unfortunately without a location there's no business either. As I said, the program was not expansive enough.

In theory that's correct, but in reality the law isn't being enforced. There is a huge amount of fraud.

What makes you say that?

> Just pay people to stay home.

With what money?

The Fed Money Printer (TM) has been running on overdrive for awhile now.

There's always money if they want to spend it. For what they pumped into the markets earlier this year, they could have given $7.5k to every American adult (or $4.5k to every single person inc children)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/03/12/fed-inje...

The repo market is not a direct cash infusion. It’s essentially the Fed propping up the price of US T-Bills (a good thing).

Bottom-left quadrant of this. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1789676-money-printer-go-brr...

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