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Comment by t-writescode | Hacker News Reader

A very frustrating thing with this statement is that it's very arguable that financing the survival of this country's citizens during a lockdown is _exactly_ the sort of thing the government should be doing, as well as minimizing the duration of the lockdown. It enables the status quo to return quickly and minimizes the change to the social fabric. Those are things I would have imagined conservatives would want: stability.

It's very strange that we couldn't move money around and hadn't been saving money "for a rainy day" exactly like this one.

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As I understand it, we have no saved money, we are just going deeper into debt. In 2020 alone we took on at least 4T of debt when in past years we only take on ~1T debt per year. And all we have to show for 2T was a "woefully inadequate" $1000 check. In order to pay everyone's rent for a year, we would need at least 12x as much, in other words a cool 24 Trillion which would more than double the entire debt the US current has. And for what? To save a few lives, the majority of whom will be dead before 2030 anyway? Mask and social distancing are huge low cost public health wins, no doubt, but suggesting going 24 trillion dollars into debt to save more lives is a huge red flag to me and I would push back.

In a very real sense, what more have the "lockdowns" in the US been than "masks and social distancing"?

In places where "social distancing" minimums have been impossible, the places have closed.

I'm in one of the most strict places in the entire United States, but I can still go to most every store I want, including hair salons. I'm only barred from places where there's a LOT of breathing (gym, church with singing), tight confines where social distancing can't be done (bars, restaurants) or staying in a singular location for a long time (church, clubs, sporting events).

> what more have the "lockdowns" in the US been than "masks and social distancing"?

Destruction of the service industries? Educational handicaps on multiple generations of students?

My point is that it's cheap to wear a mask and socially distance yourself while otherwise carrying on with life. It's extremely expensive on society to force everyone to stay home as much as possible and avoid certain businesses. It's expensive because it pushes the country more rapidly into debt, it pushes millions into poverty, it drives up suicide rates, and dozens more second and third order effects we won't find out about until the coming years.

I would put schools under "places you can't reasonably social distance".

That's why online school has been such a common thing; but, the United States isn't very good at it, and we haven't built out the appropriate social support structures and patterns (and have gone against those patterns in many cases), so it hasn't been especially viable.

Remote learning was considered better than cancelling school altogether; but, then we ran into the problem of parents and children working and going to school in the same place and that came with its own burdens.

> Remote learning was considered better than cancelling school altogether

But did we give enough thought to the third possibility? Just sending them to school normally with masks, periodically testing everyone, and contact tracing anyone who tests positive? Young people are surprisingly resilient to the disease, really just the teachers need to take extra precautions.

I admit that I know a teacher in that predicament in a school district that's been actively hiding their covid infection rate (fake testing, ignoring symptomatic children, etc) and several other of my family members are teachers working in hybrid situations, so I'm having a bit of trouble responding to this usefully as I know and hear from a teacher actively in harm's way.

I don't think the math is quite right on this.

Assuming there are 200,000,000 people in the US over the age of 18, and assuming that each of them gets $1000/month for 12 months, we have 200,000,000 * 1000 * 12 = 2.4 Trillion, which is similar to what we actually spent. The problem is, instead of uniformly distributing that 2.4 trillion among our citizens, we added complexity (and waste due to overhead) by giving money to special interests (airlines for example) and big businesses in various ways.

Yeah, I just multiplied CARES by 12 to get my number. I'm assuming you don't want to just let all the airline companies crash and burn along with all the restaurants, gyms, etc. Because then after the 12 months are up you find that millions are out of jobs and need another 12 months of rent while they look for new jobs, etc.

This pandemic is getting to all of us, for sure; and, I'm definitely one of the first to notice in myself when I'm being this way, but is there a way this could be reworded so it doesn't have the bite to it that I'm perceiving in it?

I perceive the "I'm assuming you don't want ..." part as incredibly sarcastic and belittling, as though you're putting yourself on a pedestal of knowledge and belittling your fellows having a conversation.

I know I've not been the most polite in many of these conversations; and I need to work on that, too; but, perhaps you haven't noticed it and I wanted to bring it to your attention so you don't snap at people and in conversations that actually matter.

Didn't intend to be sarcastic or biting at all. "I assume you don't want" was meant to mean "I'm assume we (collectively) don't want...". Basically, was just trying to say if we only give people rent money and ignore all businesses/let them crash and burn then that 2.4T will not be enough because now all the people that used to work for the companies that are now gone have no work.

> To save a few lives, the majority of whom will be dead before 2030 anyway?

The majority of whom were already older than the average life expectancy. We'll see excess deaths this year, but are going to see a shortfall for the next few after that.

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