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Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Well Congress needs to get reasonable with the boost per week for unemployment rather than the $600 a week boost; a number likely chosen for that 600/40 magic number. The $600 isn't sustainable let alone on top of the $1200 per house hold plus $500 per dependent.

Worse is the stuffing of the bills with defense appropriations and more items not related to COVID19. Worse is the attempt to feed the state governments between five hundred to a trillion dollars to shore up budgets of states that are not even trying to clip their expenditures, most of this is routed towards shoring up their pension systems and again, not COVID19 related.

The real pandemic is the debt bomb that Congress is foisting on the American public, remember, no serious crisis can be allowed to go to waste. It is time for the money to flow to friends and family.

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> Worse is the attempt to feed the state governments between five hundred to a trillion dollars to shore up budgets of states that are not even trying to clip their expenditures,

States shouldn't be trying to clip overall service expenditures during a massive economic and public health emergency that creates novel challenges for education delivery (health, economic safety net, and education cover much of the big ticket state spending items, and this situation creates additional demands on all of them.)

And, unlike the feds, states can't as a practical (and usually constitutional) matter meet temporary emergency need with deficit spending for operations, because most have Constitutional balanced operating budget requirements but, more importantly (because it's a constraint that applies whatever the state chooses), they have a much higher cost of borrowing because they aren’t currency issuers whose debt is in their own currency.

For that reason, it's normal for the federal government to backstop the states on major emergencies specifically so they aren't forced to make temporary economic emergencies worse by taking more money out through spending cuts or saddle taxpayers with greater debts than if the feds were paying by borrowing at the state level.

> it's normal for the federal government to backstop the states on major emergencies...

That's the problem here. The states are using the emergency to bail out their pension and other over spending that was a problem even without the pandemic. For years now, they've been warned that the promises they made could not be kept. The math doesn't lie.

They didn't care. They figured they'd worry about it when the time came, always passing the buck to the next politicians. Well, the pandemic and lack of tax revenue has now brought that point forward.

The rest of us - especially those of us in red states who've been listening to raging blue states scream at us for being 'subsidized by them' for the last decade - are paying attention to this backhanded bailout for fiscal problems not directly related to covid.

Indeed, such support used to be seen as routine: Republicans dumped a massive amount of stimulus into the economy during the 2008 crisis. It really says a lot about how much the basic functioning of our political system has decayed that this is no longer happening this time around.

Like, even if they care not a whit about the people involved (they don't), it is republicans' own self interest that they do not go into the 2020 elections having crashed the economy at an absolutely unprecedented rate. They should be doing whatever it takes to avert it.

Numbers like "33% annualized decline in the economy" should be striking fear into everyone's heart. We are speedrunning the great depression, the great depression took five years to hit bottom, we are going to do it in a year or so unless something drastic is done.

Some states like Illinois are struggling because of their spending during the last economic expansion. Bad behavior needs to lead to negative results or you'll just get more of it.

Punishing a group of people indiscriminately because a partially overlapping group of people engaged in bad behavior in the past is, itself, widely recognized as bad behavior.

The $600 a week number was chosen because the average American makes $900 a week, and the average unemployment amount is $300. $900 - $300 = $600 to make up the shortfall and get everyone to the average.

This is obviously flawed, and the initial idea was income replacement so your income remained the same, but the state of the IT infrastructure in unemployment offices across the US is so dismal there was no way they could cope with that requirement.

I'm not sure this is the time to be debt fear mongering. Such fear-mongering was nowhere to be seen when the Fed hit the markets with 2+ Trillion dollars. That money-grab went off without a peep, only when the money is going to run-of the mill Americans do we want to close our purse strings.

> The real pandemic is the debt bomb that Congress is foisting on the American public ...

And how many Americans has that pandemic killed over the last few months?

The $600 per week is definitely sustainable as are all the other payments that are going directly to people. If we can afford all the unrelated stuff you mention and a ton you didn't, we can afford to help people directly, which is the absolute number one priority.

The real pandemic is people dying and being disabled, not debt. Saying it's debt is callous and cruel as people are dying and becoming disabled all around us. How is it possible to have no empathy at all like this?

It's possible to have empathy for people who can't make ends meet, too. The death toll is terrible, clearly. As of today we're at almost 165K dead in the US, but that's out of a population of 330M, so about 1 in 2000. The economic fallout is orders of magnitude greater than that[1] certainly at least tens of millions of people impacted (but not dead, at least).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impact_of_the_COVID-1...

What is a “debt bomb” when we talk about federal spending? Suddenly, overnight - we’re seeing 10,000 percent inflation?

Hyperbolic.

You're the only one saying 10,000 percent inflation. Maybe its "only" being saddled with such high taxes to service debt our country is crippled. How would it be to have taxes comparable to Norway + nonexistent government services?

The phrase “debt bomb” fees hyperbolic because it suggests our national spending is about to have some kind unpredictable/explosive problem. We have had persistently low inflation despite significant money creation since 2008. Inflation is typically the reason we avoid creating money to fund national level spending. If someone who knows better wants to breaks down the scenario for me, please do - but as is, calling short term emergency spending a debt bomb seems overblown.

> Worse is the attempt to feed the state governments between five hundred to a trillion dollars to shore up budgets of states that are not even trying to clip their expenditures

This is so frustrating to me. States pretend like their budgets are sacrosanct and refuse to take any action to prepare themselves. They’ll milk every last drop from their constituents before they start cutting fat.

What fat do you think the states should cut? Can you give specific examples?

How about salaries and pensions? California spends more on their sweet-heart pension package than they do on education.

Also any service that is temporarily furloughed because of shelter-at-home should have their employees furloughed as well. In other words they should experience the pain the same way as the rest of us.

Links like these that show the absurd salaries, pensions, etc. that public sector employees are making in junk-bond states like Illinois, NJ, NY, and California are a dime a dozen if you search Google News:

* https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/10/26/ill...

> States pretend like their budgets are sacrosanct and refuse to take any action to prepare themselves

Very many states going into this had substantial rainy day funds, and many states have done what they can't to cut expense:service ratios while boosting services (sometimes under preprogrammed, federally-governed formulas, as for many state-federal confunded entitlements) such as employee pay cuts (like the furloughs in California). The idea that states have done nothing to prepare or that states aren't taking steps on their own is preposterous. States are structurally more limited than the feds in how they can financially respond to an urgent crises, and for that reason have always relied on the feds being part of that response, but they are not generally failing to do their part as far as financial steps; some are falling down on the public health parts, but mostly that's a result of pressure directed from the federal executive branch, not independent state intransigence or nonfeasance.

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