Our government has failed in their response at local, state, and federal levels. The other thing we're going to be seeing soon is that these Unemployment programs have failed to do what they're ordained to do.
This is an anecdote, but my brother was furloughed and has been waiting on any money (including the first stimulus) for literally months
I sort of assumed that people _must_ be receiving money because there's no way Americans in the lower deciles of savings would be able to pay their bills consistently without work or stimulus. If there's no stimulus and no work, how are they paying bills? Is it on credit? Was there actually some savings?
Roughly 1 in 3 american households are behind on their housing payments.
Most states (and all federally backed mortgages) have temporarily suspended evictions so the short answer is that people in financial distress dropped that expense, which is usually the single largest on most people's budgets (for low-income people this can often be 50% or more of take-home depending on the city - yes, the rule of thumb is that it shouldn't be higher than 25% but you simply can't find affordable housing in a lot of areas).
However that one eventually is going to come due because the federal mortgage eviction moratorium doesn't prevent you from going in default on your mortgage, it only prevents evictions. The 3-month timer is still running and as soon as the moratorium on evictions is lifted, they can kick you out immediately. So as soon as that lets up in a month or two there's going to be a massive surge in evictions in states that do not go out of their way to keep evictions suspended.
(and in fact this is probably a snowballing problem, the longer this crisis goes unchecked and the worse the economic pain gets, the more people that will be in default and the bigger the difficulty of getting "back to normal". Furthermore at some point that shit starts rolling back uphill economically, banks turned your mortgage into financial products and you not paying is cutting off the income of someone else, and in fact there is an eventual risk of a 2008-style crisis occurring on top of all the current problems if we get into a situation where people are defaulting en-masse.)
I'm not sure what you're trying to really portend here but this is a huge, huge part of that article considering it's almost the entirety of the current working class parents;
Sixty-eight percent of adults 70 and older are mortgage-free, while 15.9% of Millennials are free and clear of mortgage payments.
I'm in my mid-30s and I hardly have any friends that own houses and if they do they're tech workers with decades left on their loans.
I started my career in 2008. Millennials had to go where the jobs where, and they weren't in low COL areas. Hopefully covid opens up the market for far more remote work. I'm remote now, finally, but in a high COL area, which feels especially dumb now that I'm locked inside.
I'm not sure. I posted that to point out the danger of these statistics. We have to be careful. People can tell whatever kind of story they want to tell (at either extreme) and cite the same statistics. Mark Twain made this quip widely known, and it is relevant:
If Disraeli made it famous, why doesn't anyone have any idea when or where he said it? When Twain first used it, he indicated that it was a phrase attributed to Disraeli by some, but in a way that made it sound like Twain knew that not to be true. There is no evidence Disraeli ever said it and its first appearance in history is after Disraeli's death.
This is probably wrong. Quoting from the wikipedia article on this phrase:
> The phrase derives from the full sentence, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.";
> it was popularized in the United States by Mark Twain and others, who mistakenly attributed it to the British prime
> minister Benjamin Disraeli. The phrase is not found in any of Disraeli's works and the earliest known appearances were
> years after his death. The phrase was attributed to an anonymous writer in mid-1891 and later that year to Sir
> Charles Dilke, but several others have been listed as originators of the quote, including frequent erroneous
> attribution to Twain himself.
>Almost 40% of homes in America are owned free and clear (no mortgage).
looking merely at owned homes is ignoring everybody that rents. Renters falling behind on their rent are equally likely to be evicted as soon as the moratoriums are listed.
(and that in fact goes to my point about "your rent/mortgage is someone else's asset", a renter who's not making mortgage payments is probably still putting someone else's mortgage in the red and causing havoc in the rest of the financial system. I don't personally shed too much of a tier for the personal finances of highly overleveraged landlords doing the BRRRR type bullshit, it's been screwing up pricing for renters for a decade now, but it's a problem for the rest of the financial system too.)
Also, as another poster mentioned, the demographics of home ownership tilt very differently. Lots of boomers own their homes, in many cases free and clear. The numbers for people in their 30s (let alone 20s) are pretty low these days, so your statistic basically ignores everyone under 50.
(And in fact even if we got younger people into homes, the same wealth transfer that boomers enjoyed probably cannot be replicated - it was artificially created by lowering interest rates from the highs of 19% in the 70s/80s down to basically 0% now, allowing people to finance much larger amounts of money and causing the underlying asset values to soar. Nor would it be desirable to do so.)
And in general I disagree with your comment further down in the thread about "you can say anything with statistics". The obvious thrust of that argument is: gee, I guess we better just not use statistics and argue about feelings instead. That's so much better.
It's pretty much an argument made by people whose positions can't be justified by actual data - they don't reconsider their positions, they just want to stop looking at the data.
The point is that many statistics are worse than 'damned lies' because they are made-up to prove a point. It's like a tobacco company paying for research that shows nicotine is not addictive in 66% of people tested. I just made that up as an example. It's not true.
So before you can have any faith in stats, you have to know the source and how the research was funded and by whom (this is before we even begin to talk about methodology flaws). If you do not know that then you cannot trust the stats at all. They are indeed worse than damned lies.
I work within a financial institution (CU) and I can say they have no wish to actually evict/foreclose/etc. After the 2008 crash they bumped their reserve % 3-5 points higher than required to insulate from the next recession (here today). But for mortgages, internal notices appear to suggest it's better for the CU if they keep people in their homes and have the same level of payments resume in a few months vs auction the house. Maybe the math only works out for a few months, I'm not in the loop on those conversations. They are very community focused and not driven by profit so that helps me trust the internal news.
As someone wanting a home in a high CoL area, I would love a 10-20% off rush from thousands of houses going to auction or sale but it wold be devastating locally. We simply are not equipped, as a nation, to address the fallout from this years events. Especially not with current (lack of) leadership and circling of wagons.
I think local credit unions are a bit different than banks. I don't think JP Morgan or whatever would probably give that same consideration.
But I do take your point that banks don't necessarily want to immediately boot everybody out, foreclose, and crash the market at a time when potentially not a lot of people are buying.
Do bear in mind that the Fed has injected a shit-ton of cash into the market right now, and there actually would be more buyers than you think - it's just that they would be rental companies looking for more assets to snap up at firesale prices.
> The 3-month timer is still running and as soon as the moratorium on evictions is lifted, they can kick you out immediately.
Homeowners shouldn't rely on the moratorium. They should have contacted their lender to get on a 3-month forbearance plan which can be extended for another 3 months when it expires.
I'm not sure how many times lenders are going to permit forbearance extensions, but once people are able to get back to work and start making mortgage payments, they need to call their lender for a loan modification. This brings their account back to current.
25% of folks in NYC, the largest rental market in the US, haven't made rent payments since March. NYC has put a hold on evictions, but their owed rent is still building up. The majority of Americans weren't able to cover an unexpected $500 expense before the pandemic hit. The full depth of how bad this is going to get hasn't hit most people nor has it hit the markets.
The blanket eviction moratorium has expired in NYC. You can now be brought to court for failure to pay, but if you can prove financial hardship they can't kick you out. This is a fairly substantial burden. I'm afraid what will happen since people can't afford rent let alone legal representation.
I can really only give my personal viewpoint of it. But for me personally I just have not been paying my mortgage only because I was lucky enough to have a government backed mortgage loan where I could tell the bank "tough shit" until the end of the year.
Also there have been temporary measures in place for things like utilities, ISPs, mobile phone plans etc. where people will keep accruing obligations on their bills without the services being cutoff. However it seems that those programs are about to come to an end. Locally where I live the utility service here said they will start doing cutoffs in August.
So I think it's a mixture of some amount of savings, some access to credit, and then a kicking of the can down the road for a few months. So my guess overall is that basically we are simply delaying the problem in a bunch of different ways. But at the end of that delay is going to be a lot of economic hurt when those bills actually come due.
In my experience access to credit besides credit cards has been extremely limited.
My wife and I looked into several different personal or short term loan options for our upcoming IVF cycle(approx 30k$). Most banks have either stopped offering them completely or made the requirements much harder. The two of us with credit scores of 750+, combined 200k annual income and little existing debt couldn't get approved for a simple 5k$ loan.
I fear for those that have a more dire need for the cash than we do.
This reminds me of a little trick I learned while working in finance.
If you have bad credit but have over $1,000 in cash, go and get an unsecured loan for roughly 90% of your cash on hand. Ideally the terms should have a negligible or nonexistent prepayment penalty. Once you have the loan, repay it within 2-3 business days.
Rinse and repeat until your credit score starts to improve.
People are coasting on tiny savings, eviction freezes, not paying bills, and moving in with their friends or families. Or at least my friends anyway.
The fall/winter is going to be an absolute disaster because you can’t fix anything about the economy without getting the pandemic under control, which a large percentage of our leaders in the US have decided they have no obligation to do.
I don’t know what this is supposed to mean, but this failure extends across both parties in the United States. The refusal by politicians to take on Capital owners is pushing people into homelessness, loss of healthcare, or danger in low wage jobs, all of which further exacerbate the pandemic.
The mainstream of the Democratic Party has advanced little that would address any of this, mostly quibbling over means testing income supports and lurching right. And we can just look at that state of the pandemic in the US to know what the other side thinks we should be doing.
This is what boggles my mind. We had progressive candidates running this cycle that were outright commiting to trying something different. Yet the majority of the voter base ran towards people promising the same strategy as previous administrations. Either this crisis is magnified on HN and the majority of the voter base is unaffected by the pandemic or something else is going on.
That's because for a lot of people they just want to stop hearing about politics and go back to a status quo for them where they can ignore the growing disaster that's consuming the younger generations.
There's a massive, massive class divide between generations and ultimately this pandemic is going to explode it even further. We're still in the fingers-in-our-ear phase.
There is the glut of the older population, captivated by neutered or divisive nightly news, that does not want change, only preservation of the perceived status quo.
The Democratic party made the correct bet that they could use their media apparatus to discredit progressive candidates, get away with cheating in Iowa, and use Obama to get the other moderates to concede with promises of internal advancement. It was corrupt and repugnant, but a strategically sound approach to make sure they're headed on the ticket by a center right leader (which their donor base demands).
As someone who volunteered for multiple campaigns this cycle, I saw this clearly. But I also see most people that I have met on my travels just seem to be checked out, even if they vote. I think this is the bigger problem. The previous cycles have already just turned people off from thinking they can do massive change. Even with a record number of volunteers and supporters with a campaign like Bernie, it still wasn't enough numbers.
I often wonder how painful things will have to get to enact some change with the checked out masses. What will happen if we reach that point?
Don't forget that the Democratic party has something called Super Delegates, which basically blocks any candidate they don't agree with, even if the candidate won the popular vote. If Trump ran as Democrat, he wouldn't be president today due to this.
Also, we shouldn't forget that Michael Bloomberg decided to run last-minute as a Democrat, with the Democrat party changing the applicant rules so that he could specifically run.
The whole political apparatus is entirely corrupt. I'm not sure voting helps at this point. We have a massive amount of people who are on the last of their savings, with no unemployment benefit coming their way to help out. This may be the beginning of a revolution, if people are angry enough, maybe.
Lots of early votes didn't count because they were cast for politicians who dropped out. Actually, no votes other than Biden's counted since Bernie dropped out before the race ended as well. Yes, the odds were stacked against him by the party, but that doesn't change the fact that he did have a chance and could have given Biden a good run. So when you don't actually have a race and everyone drops out, what do you expect? The party will simply not allow progressive candidates to rise to any position of power. Maybe once the current old guard dies out, but I'm not holding my breath.
I have no data to back this up, but I would guess with interest rates at record lows and massive amounts of stimulus money with nowhere to go, getting a personal loan is rather easy right now...
This isn't some faceless government. The failure of these unemployment programs is by ideological design as ordained by the rightward lurch of the country after the Civil Rights Act.
My daughter has been waiting since March 19th for her EDD benefits. When EDD sent her the initial paperwork (after she signed up online), it had a different social security number listed for her (she typed in her correct social security number online).
The letter stated that she needed to provide proof of her social security number.
She has tried to do that for four months now. She has called them, written them snail mail letters along with proof that they have the wrong social security number, and numerous faxes. They keep telling her that the ID fraud department will eventually reach out to her. It has not happened yet after all this time. We have even reached out to the California Governor's office for help. Nothing has worked.
If she did not currently live with me and have me financially support her through all of this, she would be broke and possibly homeless.
A buddy of mine got his too within days, I wait since early May.
The EDD (California) did process millions of applications (or so they claim), but more than a million are still outstanding.
The problem seems to me to be in their mission objective: they view every applicant first and foremost as a potential "wellfare queen" and attempt to prove that as a fact (17 years ago, in the aftermath of the Internet bubble burst, I lost my job as well, applied for unemployment insurance benefit and the phone interview I went though was as bizarre as unpleasant -- I didn't get to the phone interview this time 'round).
I wished they would rather operate like the IRS: after preliminary, automated checks using tax records (was the person employed by employer as claimed, is that person now employed?) hand out the money and perform selective, random in-depth audits asynchronously.
This is the same question I have. Other family members and friends have all received theirs. He's much younger than me, working entry level jobs, filed all of his taxes, etc. I just looked up some news about it, apparently about 30-35 million(estimated) checks have not been sent out.
My GF has yet to get hers or her tax return. The stimulus check went to an address from 2 years ago and she would be on hold for hours just trying to get her address updated and stopped calling. There's maybe $3k just sitting out there but the Treasury can't get it to her. This is why I vote blue, we need to adequately fund our government systems or face issues like this.
a lot of people also ended up having to get checks even though they filed last year and everything. If you used any of the "pay for your e-filing with your tax refund", "get your tax refund as an amazon gift card with a 5% bonus!" etc type arrangements, your tax filing company actually was the bank account of record and the IRS has to send you a check since they don't have real banking info for you.
Most unemployment systems in US states were designed with the intention to keep people from getting benefits or getting them off them as soon as possible. Unsurprisingly, such systems are minimally robust when they actually need to be used, en masse.
Maybe we will learn a lesson from this, but the number one political priority right now seems to be indemnifying businesses from pandemic-related harm caused to their customers and employees, so I’m not optimistic.
I know several people who had been furloughed, including my 69 yr old mother and the extra $600 has been a godsend to them. I dont even understand where we would be as a country if that legislation had not passed considering 1 in 3 homeowner/renters missed their payments last month.
Not discounting what you said but the 30% thing is bad but a bit of a poor statistic in that usually the number is about 20%. This is because it’s not 30% can’t pay rent but 30% didn’t pay on time. By the end of the month the number who had paid was like 92% vs 96% a year ago.
So yes bad but less bad with context and certainly something that is a leading indicator of something very very bad.
Most of our "Govt" is busy playing politics and it is shameful that somehow COVID has become political as well. Trump calls masks requirement "political nonsense" which is causing many Americans to follow their President. I don't like masks too but I am happy to put one on when in public. Somehow it has become "but you are infringing on my rights".
Our Govt sucks because we continue to let them get away with this. Where are all the Senators and Congress people ? Where are the Governors ? Some are trying but most of too busy politicizing it and still denying the reality that shit has hit the fan.
It is only going to get worse. I am about to layoff a couple of employees too since they just cannot work remote and their performance has gone down significantly. As a small business owner, I don't have the margins to keep paying them anymore as we are considered a "non essential" business and cannot go to office yet.
The fact that this is not discussed more, or that congress and the president have already "moved on" is so frustrating.
The president should be making distributing this aid, and fixing the unemployment benefits mess his priority for these people. Instead he's doing a photo op with cans of beans in the Oval Office, and another photo op down the street with a bible he holds like an alien artifact
Trump messed up a ton in this crises, and has a lot to answer for. This is not one of them.
Unemployment is almost all within the remit of the individual states. The government approved additional payments to each state, but the state government is responsible for dispersing and managing the unemployment system.
Fiscal and monetary policy are under the purview of the federal government. Individual states are stuck between a rock and a hard place - needing to ramp up spending to respond to the crisis, while receiving much less tax revenue. States can only respond by taking on more debt, further compounding the cause of this financial jam. Hence red states passing the pain downwards by turning the screws on workers. The current response just takes us further into the debt spiral, making the next crisis even worse - if we're lucky enough to have a next one!
Most states are required to have a balanced budget, which makes sense seeing as how they don't have the monetary tools available to the federal government. The state budget has to be balanced at the end of the current budget cycle. States have different budget cycles - 1 year, 2 year and 3 year. Many states have dipped into their rainy day funds. For states whose budget cycle ends this year - this could get really ugly.
Regardless, the U.S. federal leadership's incompetence has made everyone's else's jobs exponentially harder. But I don't think it's fair to blame all states and municipalities for failing.
This source kind of sucks for good info. To put this number in perspective:
- It's almost exactly the same as new claims last week (1.31 million)
- Total continuing claims not including this week are at 17.4M (dropping weekly, somehow)
It's worth noting that the PPP plan for employers was extended to a 24-week period rather than the initial 8 weeks, which to me has some interesting implications and loopholes. States re-locking down due to surges in cases will probably have a bad impact on employment as well. The supplemental unemployment payments have not yet been renewed and will end at the end of July.
I would guess that most unemployed people don't have money in individual stocks in the market. In fact, 85% of all stock is owned by the richest 10% of Americans.
While it is true that a slim majority of Americans have some stock, the vast majority of that is in retirement plans, not brokerage accounts.
The theory's going around, but it doesn't ultimately make much sense. Algorithmic trading is still set up and managed by humans on a day-to-day basis, so it can't by itself explain persistent market highs.
If people defer to the algorithm instead of sanity checking it the explanation works, but you're relying on some willful ignorance on part of the traders. Or perhaps massive disconnect from reality.
“ only takes a small number of real humans doing unusual trading activity for markets to move” - WHAT? Link? Proof? Obviously false unless “small number of people”=folks like Buffet
I think the concept is similar to how BTC (and other crypto) have major price fluctuations that get reported and acted on via liquidity from a vanishingly small proportion of the actual total BTC. There's reasons, differences, nuance, etc, but I think that's where the thought starts.
If most capital is in rarely-traded funds (I think 90-95% are passive?) then by definition those last 10%-5% active investors are going to set the market, at least in the general day to day.
The economic data (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL#0 ) is showing deflation. The quantitative easing has so far been deflationary. The Fed can lower interest rates, but it cannot make people spend. People are unemployed and scared, they are not borrowing money, and it shows in the lending data as well (https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/h8/current/default.h...) where we can see falling numbers in consumer loans and credit cards.
I think people have rushed into stocks because they think that that's the safe haven for their money against inflation as they think the Fed is "printing money" and causing inflation, but the data is showing deflation. If deflation continues, bonds would be the safer place to be.
I am speaking anecdotally here but.. Deflation? I can’t think of a single product that has gone down in price and numerous things are more expensive.
In particular, virtually every single food item at the grocery store is more expensive than it was in March. Am I the only one who has experienced this? It seems like basic staples (milk, eggs, flour) are substantially more expensive than a few months ago.
Some food products have increased in price since the pandemic mostly due to production and distribution chain issues. However, the basic staples you mention are such a small proportion of the budgets of people that even a significant rise in their price won’t move the inflation needle much compared to other categories.
Plenty of products aren't lowering in price, but are getting you more quality for the same price, e.g. a faster CPU or more RAM in your smart phone. Economists consider that a price drop for the calculation of inflation.
That's technically correct, though of course does not feel like it for many people. To the average consumer, a "phone that can play today's games" is the same measurement today as it is next year, and if prices don't change, they might not consider that "quality increase".
You need to consider the whole basket that the CPI is based on including other factors like housing, utilities, and oil/gas. We probably won't see any specific store bought items drop in price but trends overall will reflect deflation. Part of that is the cash injection is not spread over just the US population but anyone that relies on the USD for transactions or backing their currency. Being the default currency has perks.
Oil/Gasoline went down in price early this year quite dramatically. This (as energy cost) is included with a heavy weight in the price index calculation.
I have experienced what you have -- food is about the same or more expensive than before. But the housing market has softened. Retail goods in stores are much cheaper. Clothing is incredibly cheap -- go to an outlet store and you'll see 50% sales everywhere.
How does housing costs help anyone? Nobody is moving if they can help it and costs are tied into long term contracts. I had a standard rent increase since my state allows them during the pandemic.
You are correct - I moved and thought the store in the new area was a ripoff before realizing that food prices are up everywhere. I buy a fair amount of Indian groceries and the prices of many staples is up ~25-30%.
Food and oil prices are volatile and can mask inflationary and deflationary periods, which is why I linked to the consumer price index minus food and energy as that is more accurate.
Well, the Fed is buying corporate junk bonds (bond ETFs) through special vehicles. We are not in the Japan territory where their central banks owns 80% of stock ETFs. This is why no one wanna sell any stocks in the states. Just a psychological boost, not direct stock purchases.
Everyone seems to think the stock market going up is always an indicator of an increase in value of those stocks. But there are at least two reasons the price of an asset can increase. One is the asset gains value. The other is the currency loses value. I don't see how anyone can look at the US economy right now, outside of the stock market, and come to the conclusion that more value is being created or profit being made. The unemployment numbers alone tell us there's less being produced, less work being accomplished.
Another factor is most western nation bonds as well as corporate bonds are running close to 0% return. As long as competition for investment is sitting at about 0%, including private equity investments in companies that could fail in the next year due to recession, supply chain issues, or tariff wars, where else are people putting money?
Most employed Americans are still paying into retirement and mostly dumping cash into index funds on the bet that in 20-40 years the market will be up. Private investors and hedge funds are watching the Fed buy up trillions in bad bets, might as well make more bets with a feeling of lower risk. Even Hertz is gaming the system at a time when it's still very uncertain how the US will cope with the pandemic long term.
This my be due to oil price drops in the past quarter with prices going negative at one point. But generally speaking we are not seeing excess inflation, quite the opposite. I think we are going to see a massive drop off in Q3, especially based on recent weak Q2 earnings reports and likelihood of the US not coping well at all.
Consumer price inflation is not the same thing as asset price inflation. They're in two different worlds. Asset price inflation rarely transfers to consumer price inflation, because when you have $100M you are probably putting that into assets (e.g. luxury house) and not buying 1 billion macbooks.
> Can UBI scheme help to overcome Unemployment crisis ? @varbhat
You realize that UBI requires monies, right?
The US Federal government, and most states, are bankrupt. There is no money for this years bills. There was no money for last years bills, and we keep borrowing at exorbitant interest rates.
Our deficit (shortfall for this year) is -more than- 2.7 trillion dollars.
Our debt (shortfall for previous years) is -more than- 4 trillion dollars.
We can't pay unemployment claims because there's no money...
Where the hell is anyone getting monies for UBI?!?!?!
Neither the US Federal government, nor any state government are bankrupt. Under current law, it is impossible for any of those entitys to declare bankruptcy. There was a proposal by McConnell to allow states to declare bancruptcy; but it was widely ridiculed as a stupid idea (and I doubt seriously considered by him).
"No money" is not a meaningful concept for the federal government. It has two options for what to do with the money supply: increase it, or decrease it. Leaving the money supply unchanged is just a degenerate form of these and generally bad economic policy (deflationary).
Currently, there is a massive drop-off in the velicity of money, which, if not countered, would have a deflationary effect. Increasing the money supply has an inflationary effect to counter this. In fact, the federal reserve has been increasing the money supply to maintain target inflation. Currently they do so by giving money to banks (and recently, by buying bonds directly). Why shouldn't they run their monetary policy by giving money to individuals instead.
Money is created by the government, and creating more of it to distributed equally across individuals just redistributes the relative purchasing power from people with more than average to people with less than average.
Not just the government, not really the government at all unless you consider the Federal Reserve Banks lending money to regional banks "government".
The majority of the M0 money supply, that bit of currency we use to get things done in our economy, is created by fiat at any of the ~4500 commercial banks (in the USA). Every time they give out a loan they create the money out of thin air as debt on their balance sheets. They are only required to have a tiny fraction of the money they 'loan'/create (fractional reserve).
If instead of letting only these banks create money, if the new M0 money supply was distributed to ~300 million human people instead of ~4500 corporate people, there'd be plenty for basic income. It'd be universal basic income then instead of commercial bank basic income. And banks could just be banks and get by on their actual services instead of being money machines.
... and that's not even acknowledging what the NY Fed have begun doing since October of last year, 10s to 100s of billions a week swapped for worthless items from corporations who can't pay their bills in Reverse Repo operations: a shallow attempt to pretend it isn't just giving money away (https://apps.newyorkfed.org/en/markets/autorates/temp).
From the gov's point of view, citizens and companies are shareholders in the "US corporation". Right now, the poor citizens own a 10% stake in the corporation. UBI is about giving them maybe 20%, at the expense of diluting the share of bigger shareholders. The board members don't want to dilute their own share, but if the corporation goes out of business, their own stake won't be worth anything. The absolute numbers are irrelevant: what matters is the stake percentage, not whether it's measured in billions or trillions of shares.
Real interest rates on treasuries are negative. That is, adjusted for inflation, people are giving away money to the government when they loan it money. That's the opposite of exorbitant.
Yeah, we had $5 trillion to drop on bad market bets. We had something like $10trillion over 10 years to give as tax breaks to the ultra wealthy.
We can deal with a few trillion to establish basic income replacements for general benefits, universal healthcare, affordable college/education, and other programs to better our citizens vs the rich and stock market.
The numbers here are basically on an exponential decay curve from ~6M new claims in the last week of March. (FWIW, the pre-2020 record for new weekly claims, seasonally adjusted, was ~700k in 1982--we broke that in March and haven't stopped breaking it since).
They release a jobs report on the first friday of each month with asjustements as data from prior months made it in. They survey businesses and process a lot of other data to deliver these reports and have been generally apolitical and data focused though the current administration has tried to influence numbers to their advantage, effectively undermining a critical component of our democracy.
Please don't take HN threads further into generic political flamewar. These sequences just endlessly repeat, and repetition is what we most try to avoid here.
Majority vote was not the deciding criteria, known to all well before the election. So this is an odd complaint - that somehow the majority needs to decide.
Also, the majority didn't vote for the Democrats either. Of those who voted, 48% voted D, 46% voted R, 3% voted Johnson, 1% voted Stein, misc voted to others.
So would a D win also have been somehow not deserved because they didn't get a majority?
And this is only of those who voted, which is only 55% of eligible voters. So D (and R) both got ~25% of the eligible vote. Some of this is because many people were disgusted by both parties. Trump and Hillary were the two worst Presidential candidates in history, as measured by unfavorability ratings [1]. Had the Dems run anyone with a somewhat normal rating, they would have likely trounced Trump.
We set up some rules that were not entirely unreasonable, and enough people did vote for the outcome that we got that the US does indeed deserve this. And both parties ran record level disliked candidates, so what did you expect would happen?
[1] "Among U.S. adults, Clinton now has a 56% unfavorability rating, while Trump had 63%.
And with registered voters, the two are basically tied: Clinton has 59% unfavorability and Trump has 60%."
I don't think the OP meant the president. The senate has about 400+ bills sitting on it's desk. If we had a functioning senate, then it would force the president to publicly veto the bill.
The Senate also has the right to publicly not debate on bills, which also sends information to voters, just as if the President vetoed a bill. Each of the three pieces has these powers and should exercise them as they think they were elected to do.
That is by design. I wish our state (Oregon) was of similar design so that all interests are represented. As it is now the populous centers, mostly Portland and Eugene, dictate their values to the rest of the state.
Rural areas are already heavily overrepresented in the american system. We certainly don't need to put the thumb on the scale further.
The ultimate problem is that "the rest of the state" (for virtually all states) is empty, hardly anybody lives there, and letting a minority override the will of everybody else is tyranny of the minority.
Taken to the extreme, this is ultimately what killed South Africa and Rhodesia and other countries - a relatively small minority imposing their will on the majority, things getting worse and worse with no recourse for the people whose lives were actually affected until things boiled over.
At its core, this is ultimately an argument for anti-democratic principles.
I’m not sure the translation of your argument works. America is not Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).
There is often something lost in this argument, which I think is a strength of the system, not a weakness. That is: the US Senate, which was the compromise, is a rejection of utilitarianism as the pinnacle of governing.
You don’t want tyranny of the minority, and I don’t want tyranny of the majority, so let’s have a system of checks and balances that ensures (within limits) that we address both groups.
So it's better to have rural dwellers with an outsized voice in deciding what happens in city areas?
You also are performing a convenient geographic sidestep where suddenly "where you live" isn't the country or even the state but is really only concerned with the local. So the rest of the people who live in the nation are diminished.
Localism has led to lots of problems in American history, now we can add a shitshow of a Coronavirus response on top of the others.
The party of localism tends to be gung-ho about that huge federal military operation... yet refuses a necessarily-similar intervention in a pandemic.
An extra large irony here is that "left-leaning cities in right-leaning states" is much more common than the reverse, so what we often see in practice is rural state dwellers telling city dwellers in those states what to do. Look at the mask stuff for Atlanta vs Georgia from today, for instance.
That's without skewing the strength of the vote, even!
So, no, I'm far from convinced that we have to protect the poor rural folks from their fellow citizens.
No, it doesn't make sense that people should have greater voting power based on their location in the same polity.
Your argument is equally valid in reverse -- there's no reason why rural dwellers should decide what happens in cities. Why should your vote count for more because I have more neighbors than you do?
While city dwellers vote may be technically less powerful on a per capita basis, they make up for it in numbers. There are simply more of you with similar needs/wants. Not to mention far more money to achieve those needs and wants. In a city an individual's needs from his/her government are just less unique.
No, I want both minority and majority voices heard. What I am saying is that city voices are strong. They get the majority of the funding and influence when it comes to politics, regardless of voting power on a per capita basis.
The difference is you are arguing that rural citizens should get no say whatsoever. I care about everyone instead of only those living in a small geographic circle and understand that the needs of those living outside of that circle are unique from city dwellers themselves.
> What I am saying is that city voices are strong. They get the majority of the funding and influence when it comes to politics,
your experience of the american political system is vastly different from mine. You have a whole house in congress devoted to making sure low-population states get disproportionate representation, the other congressional house and the state legislatures have boundary lines that are gerrymandered to disproportionately benefit and empower you, a rural farming state has the first say in primaries and an incredible amount of pandering from legislators, the electoral college gives you disproportionate power over selecting the president in the general, you get incredibly disproportionate amounts of federal spending (military bases, road funding, etc) - far more than they contribute, I can go on.
Hell, in some cases the states themselves have been explicitly drawn to increase the amount of rural power - the only reason the Dakotas aren't a single state is so they'd get extra senators and representatives.
Again, you are coming off as a member of a rural minority who is crying that they don't have total and utter political power over the urban majority. You already have a hugely disproportionate amount of power, influence, and funding in the American system.
A vote in Wyoming is already 3.2x more potent than a vote in California based on electoral weighting, and the same is effectively true for most other areas of the government that involve voting in any form. How much higher, exactly, do you think that should be?
Cities are much more diverse than rural areas in terms of ethnicity, religion, economic class, linguistics, etc. To claim that city dwellers have "similar needs/wants" simply doesn't make any sense.
And having "similar needs/wants" doesn't have a logical connection to justifying taking away their voting voices.
No, it isn't. One person, one vote. If there are more farmers than city dwellers, the farmers have more say. If there are more city dwellers than farmers, the city dwellers have more say.
If you break this argument down, it gets really muddled.
Let's pick a state - Kansas, nice and rectangle. Let's say it was empty, and 10 farmers moved in and divided it 10 ways. They are happy to themselves on their huge plots of land, doing their own thing.
One farmer needs extra cash, so sells off a dozen acres. That dozen acres puts in a neighborhood of 20 houses. Now that 20 houses controls the entire state, effectively. They decide people shouldn't be able to own so much land, and owning more than 10 acres is illegal.
Sure it's contrived, but you start to notice how it's not as simple as 'majority rules is best.'
If you were to break down the argument even further, let's say Kansas had a farmer that owned 90% of the land. The remaining 10% of the land was shared between 1000 people.
Why should that single farmer be allowed to control the entire state over the rest of the 1000 people?
I'm making the argument that one concentrated area should not control the fate of a much larger area. I'm not, however, asserting that the larger area should control the fate of the concentrated area, either.
I think the issue we're all dancing around is that state lines really need to be re-cut. The rural areas have more in common with each other, the urban areas have more in common with each other.
Cut the urban areas into their own states (eg take the metro NYC or Chicago area and make them their own states) and then merge a lot of the "empty land" in between to try and equalize the population somewhat. End up with somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 urban states and 15 rural states.
Yeah, I got downvoted, but I was really trying to be philosophical and frame an opposing side. I walked around a while thinking on it, and that's all I came up with - more states. Our nation would look really gerrymandered, I think.
I actually think less states. Like, even 15 rural states is probably a stretch, it probably would be closer to 8. There really isn't a point to having like 30 states that have less than a half million people in them.
I would slice it into something like:
* Appalachia Region
* Gulf Region
* Great Lakes Region
* Heartland region
* Rockies Region
* Cascadia Region
* Desert Region (Southwest US - need a better name but I'm coming up with a blank.)
* Maybe a Northern Shield region? Could just be part of the rockies region.
Those areas all have common environmental concerns and life experiences, and would bring a sufficient number of residents to be worth bothering over. Then you have the metro areas as their own states, enclaves within the larger regions. If metro areas grow out you would probably would have to have some mechanism to vote to transfer counties/districts between states.
Never going to happen of course, the number of political barriers is insane. And Republicans would never ratify any such plan that rearranged states as any sensible arrangement would unwind the disproportionate power they wield based on the current arrangement.
The only mechanism that could conceivably be achieved is splitting blue states up, and it's not really a good one since populations are so concentrated - imagine trying to split New York City into like 5 independent states, it would just be completely impossible to administer in practice.
In reality we will just keep bumbling along with our current system that immensely, disproportionately advantages the rural states and rural populations. Unless the country goes into an actual civil war, of course, which is not as unthinkable as it was 4 years ago.
The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say.
Moreover, why does people's location on a 2d grid matter at all for grouping people under representatives? Why not the first letter of their surname? Their age? Maybe the altitude of their home? Seems just as arbitrary.
> The populous centers have more people, so it makes sense that they have more say.
This is a rather short-sighted position. There's a reason the tyranny of the majority was avoided, and it's because the majority will always vote for their own benefit. If they do so, it almost always hurts the 49%.
You have to balance the needs of a state as if it were a living organism. You can't simply optimize everything for the heart when the lungs have needs as well, or the body dies.
I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way? If you start picking this apart it really just comes down to "yeah but the majority can sometimes be wrong", which, I have news for you, applies to the minority as well.
At the end of the day, representative democracy exists instead of "pure" democracy because there's issues scaling the operation of government into something where everybody votes on everything. So we decide to have 1 representative for every N people. To do this, we need to break people into cohorts somehow, such that each cohort is roughly the same size. There's lots and lots of ways to do this, but we seemed to have settled on geographic locations, and sizing so that they (mostly) have similar numbers of people.
But since populations can be extremely concentrated in some areas, cohorting people by geographic location becomes less and less useful. It seems to me in an ideal world, everyone would be randomly assigned to a cohort via some sort of consistent hash, and they would be evenly distributed. Mind explaining to me why this would be inferior to cohorting on geographic location?
You seem to assume there is a 'right' or 'wrong' answer. There is not. For example, we have California suffering from catastrophic mismanagement of their water resources. You have one group who wants to move more water into the population centers, essentially taking the precious resource from the rural areas (farmland, which is rather important). You have another group who refuses to build more reservoirs or dams to better manage the water (because NIMBY). And then you have the minority, the folks in the rural areas.
Nobody is right or wrong, they just all have different priorities. Regardless of those priorities, the resources must be allocated to ensure the entire ecosystem can continue to survive. The only solutions to accomplish that are going to be compromises. But unfortunately, the groups in the population centers have managed for an incredibly long time to avoid compromise. So, now California finds itself in an unenviable position of battling drought and fire nonstop.
> I keep hearing people say this, and it baffles me. If the majority of people feel a certain way, who's to say it's not the right way?
Because, as parent said, the majority will usually benefit themselves even if it means harming the minority. If I belonged to some 51% group, why would I not vote to double my wealth, even if it meant stealing from the other 49%? And before you say 'I would never vote for that', it's never worded that way, but more subtle policies that would achieve the same thing.
That applies to the minority as well. The minority will benefit themselves even if it harms the majority and involves stealing from the 90%. NIMBY policies are exactly that where wealthy landowners vote and use their wealth to exclusively benefit themselves over everyone else. Rural voters can do the same thing where they vote in people and ways that explicitly harm the larger city as some sort of perceived revenge policy.
Which then goes back to the person you responded to: That the majority and the minority can both make wrong policy decisions.
I think the great irony of the arguments I see surrounding the tyranny of the majority is that often in rural areas or with rural politicians you'll see them employ this argument. Something like 'we need to protect our way of life from city folk' or 'we're not bothering anyone and want to be left alone'.
But then those same rural politicians will then make the opposite argument against other minority populations (such as people whom are LGBT or among race lines) and that we shouldn't let a small minority control our state or that who cares what they think. They switch rapidly from 'tyranny of the majority is bad' to 'tyranny of the minority is bad'.
Politicians gonna politic. That doesn't mean that the 'tyranny of the majority' doesn't exist, but they're just using the words to try to score points.
I caution people not to let politicians become their mental picture of the constituency.
I live in the Netherlands. A tiny country. It would be to this country's advantage if such a mad, insane rule as this were in place.
No one ever suggests it because it's obviously ridiculous.
LOOK at the results of America's screwed up voting system! A deranged madman in power, the economy in collapse with no rescue even planned, and a virus growing exponentially with no plan to fight it.
You just said it yourself though. You live in a country where the entire population would fit in one metropolitan area of the US. What would work for your country wouldn't necessarily work for ours because we have people living in dramatically different conditions spread across thousands of miles and over 300 million more people to deal with.
We have a state with 100,000 square miles and only 600,000 residents. We have another state that has a little more space but has 40 million residents. Their circumstances are so vastly different that the policies of one would be very unlikely to work well for the other.
> LOOK at the results of America's screwed up voting system! A deranged madman in power, the economy in collapse with no rescue even planned, and a virus growing exponentially with no plan to fight it.
America uses first past the post. It isn't great, there are many better systems later developed. If we were to improve our voting and party system it would benefit the entire country massively.
Just one example: city people trying to ban guns statewide while rural people live in places with dangerous wildlife (and more) will cause preventable deaths. In a city far more freedom must be curtailed in order for people to tolerate living near each other and rural folk often live out there precisely because they can't be happy making that trade-off.
Yes but why is "city/rural" the only dichotomy anyone bothers to fixate on? Why not skin color? Age?
You could just as easily say "old people are trying to pass laws that make lives miserable for young people, we really ought to have fewer representatives for old people", and it would make exactly as much sense as saying the same thing about a geographic location. There are a million different ways you could slice people up into representatives, but we end up settling on geographic location because... reasons, I guess.
I've met two 40-50 something ex-Oregoners who've said the same thing. They were extremely libertarian, and truly unlike anyone I'd met before. Almost like they came from some foreign(to me) culture. Both complained about how the population influx of Portland ruined the state, whatever that means, and both left looking for new adventures. I'm really curious what Oregon in the 70's-80's was like. The way they described it almost reminds me of Appalachian culture.
You will still find those types in Roseburg, Medford, parts of Clackamas county (I'm looking at you, Damascus), etc, where they refuse to pay for things like local libraries. Ask them why Coos Bay is full of drugs and see what sort of look you get from them.
Do you have examples of state level legislating in Oregon that you think needs to be changed? The big right-wing bugaboos in the PNW tend to be about federal policy (c.f. land use regulation), and the most impactful progressive laws tend to be at the city government level (Portland's $15 minimum wage, say).
I mean... what exactly are you complaining about? The straw ban?
"We" didn't do anything. The roughly 25% of people that voted for Trump and his enablers got what they asked for. The rest of us are victims of late stage democracy.
> We get the government we voted for, so I guess that's the one we deserve.
Underrated comment. We elected a joke president with a track record of failures, reneging on promises and bad leadership. Those attributes combined with a pandemic is showing us what we deserve for our choices.
This is an anecdote, but my brother was furloughed and has been waiting on any money (including the first stimulus) for literally months