re: #34 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

Some of it seems too complicated to implement in the short term.

And this idea of sending checks to people immediately whether the $1k as Trump seems to accept, or $2k as Maxine Waters suggests - sure, I’ll take the money. But how will the government find how to send money to every adult? People who don’t submit IRS forms will not be in the IRS database. And the addresses the IRS have for many will be out of date. One can come up with a long list of issues that’s going to be hurdles.

I haven’t filed IRS forms in ages. One solution would be for people to apply using a Social Security number to either the IRS or SSA (whichever is given control of the putative money).

A debt-holiday is probably workable… but does that mean people can just open new credit accounts at will and spend whatever credit said new accounts allow during this period, but not pay it back? Will a debt-holiday lead to lenders just not issuing new debt? If no new mortgages are written, then won’t that pretty much stop any house sales (other than the very rich who buy houses completely with cash.)

That’s nice for people with debt. For those of us with no debt, it does nothing for us.

Not all houses are sold to the very rich with all cash. We bought our house with all cash. (That said, it was only $15,000 plus expenses for title insurance and such.)

And so on.

I wonder if a better approach would be to take a clue from FDR. Why not just tell OPM that the US Gov’t has a job for anyone who has lost wages during this crisis? A massive works project. Surely there’s more than enough deferred repairs to this country, and enough tasks to be done during this crisis, to employ many millions of people. The OPM and US laws already allow for temporary government employment, so this can be implemented immediately.

Maybe. I don’t know enough about economics. My understanding of the payment is it’s supposed to be for everyone (even children), to help put money in the economy by giving people money to spend.

Only giving jobs to the able-bodied does not do that.

Moreover, not everyone has a bank account; direct deposits would not work for that reason. Printing 320,000,000 cheques and processing all that would take a lot of paper, time, and work as well.

I imagine any approach would be difficult to implement.