Stimulating Talk

$1,000 for every adult, defined I suppose as everyone 18 years old and older?

Stupid idea. Why?

Because no one needs $,1000 right now

Some people need $10,000. Some need $20,000.

Some people don’t need more money right now.

And some need to pay a surcharge valued on their 2019 income taxes to pay for what needs to be done.

And some, if in fact, they are so wealthy they are able virtually to avoid taxation, need to be assessed in some other way to help pay the fiscal stimulus to counter this most consequential event.

There has to be a way to differentiate between people laid off or forced into layoffs by business closures and those able to continue to work and thereby able to continue to receive wages and salaries; and between those rarer people, the rich, the wealthy and the super-wealthy who need nothing because they have more than anyone needs.

The former need cash assistance, the latter doesn’t. Most retirees need assistance, but lots don’t.

A payroll tax reduction or elimination is a disguise to wreck Social Security and/or Medicaid. If that is done it is not repairable. When he signed the 1935 Social Security Act into law FDR said, “let no politician mess with my system of Social Security.” A strong caution then, an even stronger one now.

There seems to be a lack of critical thinking about how to structure a stimulus but it ought to contain this thought – that this fiscal stimulus should be designed to rescue those stranded by the vast shutdowns across the economy.

The money they need now is not for discretionary spending because — because that is precisely the kind of spending that has been shut down putting them out of work as waiters and waitresses, cooks, chefs, hotel cleaners, hotel maintenance men, taxi drivers, ticket sellers, ushers, casino workers, cruise ship workers, airport and airlines workers – on and on and on and on.

If you gave upper-middle-class earners $1,000 today what would they do with it? What could they do with it? Buy a set of golf clubs they can’t use now? Take the family to see a Broadway show that’s closed? Go out to an expensive dinner? In what restaurant, where? Buy airplane tickets and book a weekend resort getaway on a plane not flying to a resort that closed yesterday? Buy a new Mac at an Apple store that’s closed?

$1,000 is discretionary for those who don’t really need it but it is a tease and an insult to those who need a great deal more right now and who will need much, much more in the months ahead – especially when we know studies say a substantial majority of Americans haven’t got so much as $400 in savings for a bad time.

This fiscal stimulus package ought to direct spending to make sure those forced out of work by the current public health emergency can pay for necessities — for shelter, food, health coverage and care, some child care if they need it and can arrange it.

The wrong spending in this situation is through any tax decrease. The right kinds might very well include cash grants – but ones made with well-conceived standards and a clear focus on who needs them now and why they are in need?

Grants should be designed to understand the part that maintaining necessary necessity spending will play in maintaining social and civic order before want dissolves into panic and panic, in turn, sets loose chaos and disorder.

But, sadly, public policy too often is not something we make but something that happens to us caused by people who don’t think about consequences or have no experience with understanding how to identify public policy objectives and then design responses to meet them.

There is no evidence that Trump, Mnuchin, the economic midget Kudlow, Kushner, Meadows, any of these benighted characters understand any of this, much less will even think about these kinds of things, weigh them in the balance or look ahead to how what is done now will affect us in July, next September, a year from now.

Why? Because they do not know how to govern but someone has to, someone must. So governors are as best they can but even they do not have the single most important power to be exercised now, that of the federal purse.