7 ms·

I'm thinking the Europeans (at least the ones that did this) got it right by subsidizing payrolls so employers could just keep on paying staff as if they were w

I'm thinking the Europeans (at least the ones that did this) got it right by subsidizing payrolls so employers could just keep on paying staff as if they were working. Much simpler to coordinate payments to a smaller number of endpoints, none of the hassle of trying to process orders of magnitude more unemployment claims, etc. But, then I suppose it would be an obstacle to companies using the opportunity to permanently trim staff. Hmm.

hogFeast 6y ago
The US way was much smarter...although not smart either in ways. In Europe, you have companies that are functionally insolvent, that will never trade profitably again, and which are being paid not to close. I know of companies where I am that are starting to look at letting hundreds of people go...those people were paid for two months by the govt. And why? A good chunk of these people needed no help at all. The point of an unemployment system is that you focus payments on people who actually need help (btw, you can run an insurance system too...but some European countries that went this way don't have the tax base or economic structure for a true, income-substitution system). It is a typically European solution which is why some countries in the region regard 10% unemployment as a huge triumph. What most European countries have done is fire all the bullets in their gun in the first 10 seconds of a battle that will go on for a long time...this is particularly foolish given how much debt some of these countries need to roll over this year. Also, the US "money for everyone" program was equally stupid for the same reasons.
- throw7 6y ago
  Well, just want to point out, "money for everyone" is not true. I'm sure there are workers here on HN that did not receive any due to income.
  - thephyber 6y ago
    > I'm sure there are workers here on HN that did not receive any due to income True. The income cutoff for Trump Bucks for a working single person was about what Facebook pays interns in the Bay Area.
  - hogFeast 6y ago
    How terrible the govt give you money because you earned too much?
- nabla9 6y ago
  US economists think that US way is stupid, corrupt and inefficient. It's better to do it in European way. https://promarket.org/2020/03/24/economics-and-finance-professors-from-major-universities-write-to-congress-bail-out-people-before-large-corporations/ https://promarket.org/2020/03/24/economics-and-finance-profe...
  - hogFeast 6y ago
    Yep, that it is typical of US economists who don't understand much about Europe (it typically doesn't extend beyond: so we can have our cake and eat it).
  - mrep 6y ago
    How so? That article is arguing for what they think the US should do and it basically matches what the US did in fact do. The CARES act was by far a bailout to citizens directly through the stimulus checks and the extra $600 a week in unemployment and indirectly by funding payroll for airlines and small businesses. The rest is basically loans which have to be payed back and funding for hospitals and state governments.
theredbox 6y ago
Are you referring to the “KURZARBEIT” scheme?
WanderPanda 6y ago
I like to also view this as an opportunity for a more efficient resource allocation in the long run. In my view you are trading off short term stability vs. long term efficiency. To be more clear: In Germany we have a vast amount of people who think the government should guarantee most parts of their life, especially their job. Most people will stay at the same employer for their whole life, also because it is relatively hard and costly to lay people off. This leads to very static structures and wrong incentives. People even believe they are trading their time for money and not their productivity for money. I believe it can be healthy letting a shock through to that system from time to time so that a more optimal allocation can be attained. Trying to micromanage to soften a shock only introduces bias to the system reducing its natural variance, leading to a less efficient allocation.
- groby_b 6y ago
  You are free to leave the country if that so upsets you. Meanwhile, I'm glad I'm a citizen of a place that values people's lives over "the economy" or a "more optimal allocation".
  - shuckles 6y ago
    There is a good case to make that you’re analysis is a false dichotomy.
  - seibelj 6y ago
    If the government paid you to dig a hole and fill it back up, all day everyday, for absolutely no purpose, would you feel happy and fulfilled? What about if 50 years ago the government paid you to create typewriters, and because there is no change and everything is static, they are still paying you to make typewriters? Except now they go straight into the trash. The march of progress is important. Jobs need to be destroyed if they are no longer necessary. Paying people with tax dollars to continue to do the same thing for life is absurd.
    - Fjolsvith 6y ago
      Downsize government?
Barrin92 6y ago
This works because European countries are very corporatist. There is a high degree of labour organisation and governments, unions, and employers often work together to maintain say, employment rather than responding to market fluctuations. This is why German unions say in the early 2000s during Germany's "sick man of Europe" period, negotiated stalling pay raises to maintain employment. In the US (and also often here on HN) this will just be described as inefficient, ignoring market signals or something like it. I don't think it's even possible to coordinate the economy like this in the US.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  It requires a level of corporate control over politics that just doesn't exist in the US.
  - dathinab 6y ago
    Oh, it does exist. Just not for labor unions and similar. From what I can tell corporate induced bs* laws seem to be more common there than here. (i.e. caused lobbying, not in the interest of the population)
    - joe_the_user 6y ago
      The problem is corporations exert huge influence in the US but only indirectly through feeding various ideologies. These ideologies the exalt the market and enterprises, certainly but they tend to also.not understand how actual business works (the average American politicians has been claiming government should work like a small family lumber mill for generations). Today, I can't help but think the super rich of America (at least those not slaves to ideology themselves) must be rethinking their support for extreme polarizing positions and "market fundamentalism" as the Federal government abjectly fails to meet the challenges of unified approach to disaster and conflict that is it's overall purpose.
    - hogFeast 6y ago
      That makes no sense. Look at the largest donors, unions are absolutely huge, and have a very outsized role in the US (although that isn't unusual).
gen3 6y ago
We did this though. The small business loans are fully forgivable if the business uses it to pay employee salaries.
- adrianmonk 6y ago
  And the loans are only forgivable if the business retains their employees. From https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relief-options/paycheck-protection-program#section-header-8 https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relie... : > Forgiveness is based on the employer maintaining or quickly rehiring employees and maintaining salary levels. Forgiveness will be reduced if full-time headcount declines, or if salaries and wages decrease.
dathinab 6y ago
> But, then I suppose it would be an obstacle to companies using the opportunity to permanently trim staff. Hmm. At least not for smaller businesses. Remaining fixed cost and no income are still often enough to give a reason for layoffs, in some case also a true and honest reason. It's more like doing so doesn't fit well with (parts of) the way the US handles employment.
makomk 6y ago
I think generally those European schemes involved paying people less than if they were working normally. The UK one was 80% of people's normal paychecks, others were worse, some were presumably better. That detail seems to have been mysteriously omitted from a lot of the US media coverage.
- dogma1138 6y ago
  I think it’s also relevant to note that the US payout is on average higher than payouts in the EU. The only big difference is that once the federal grants are withdrawn much of Europe will have a much better social safety net to fall back on.
- oakesm9 6y ago
  For the UK scheme, companies can furlough staff. During this time they can't do any work for that company. The company can pay them anywhere between 80% and 100% of their normal salary and then the government will reemberse the company for the 80%. That means that furloughed staff can be paid their full salary,but the company is only on the hook for 20% of it. Anecdotally, smaller companies with few members of staff (who are financially able) are paying 100%, while most large businesses are paying 80%.
nabla9 6y ago
Anat Admati, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/anat-r-admati https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/anat-r... a professor of finance and economics at Stanford, who specialties in debt leveraging in finance took really hard shot at the US government policy using the same line of reasonign. https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/05062020/anat-admati-perils-corporate-debt-and-how-covid-19-relief-efforts-have-gone https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/05062020/anat-admat... >I was shocked and dismayed by the level of accountability and by the way it targeted throwing money at places that less need it and not spending it on places that do need it or in the most direct ways. If you want companies not to fire employees, you can look at examples in Europe like Denmark or England or Germany. You take over the payroll. You do not say to a hotel chain "Oh, do me the favor and don't fire the people." Just say "You know what? You can go and renegotiate your debt contract, you can renegotiate your rent," which is what every small business has to do anyway, "We will pay your employees right now, because they can't work, okay?" ... >There are a lot of people suffering in the economy that were just living paycheck to paycheck, and that includes small businesses. So the way they target the support even for small businesses is so cumbersome, is so inefficient, is so misused and abused and is so poorly governed, it's really, for somebody who's interested in governance in general for all institutions, private and government, I was shocked and dismayed by the level of accountability and by the way it targeted throwing money at places that less need it and not spending it on places that do need it or in the most direct ways > So some colleagues and I organized a letter, signed now by over 230 academics from law, economics, and finance, saying that this targeting to large corporations is completely misguided,
SamReidHughes 6y ago
This was a proposal made by Republicans, in the form of a payroll tax cut (since the first $120K or so of income in America gets taxed 7.5% on the employer side).
throw0101a 6y ago
> Much simpler to coordinate payments to a smaller number of endpoints, none of the hassle of trying to process orders of magnitude more unemployment claims, etc. Or simply have your tax agency send the cheques or direct deposit (like Canada), instead of going through banking middle-men: * application time <10 minutes * e-deposit in <5 days Many US states make in hard to apply for unemployment benefits on purpose: * https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/24/21225254/coronavirus-unemployment-benefits-pamela-herd https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/24/21225254/c... * https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/04/03/its-a-sh-sandwich-republicans-rage-as-florida-becomes-a-nightmare-for-trump-1271172 https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/04/03/its... * https://www.marketplace.org/shows/the-uncertain-hour/unemployment-benefits-are-hard-to-get-thats-on-purpose/ https://www.marketplace.org/shows/the-uncertain-hour/unemplo...
- gruez 6y ago
  >Or simply have your tax agency send the cheques or direct deposit (like Canada), instead of going through banking middle-men: I don't get it, isn't sending checks/direct deposits still going through "banking middlemen"? AFAIK the stimulus checks are direct deposited by the IRS/treasury, unemployment benefits are paid through checks/direct deposit as well.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > According to the Cares Act—the $2 trillion stimulus bill that became law last month—there is nothing preventing banks from simply claiming individual Americans’ $1,200 lifeline before it even reaches their hands, if they owe outstanding debt. While Congress is not expected to gavel back in until May, the Treasury Department could still issue regulations exempting stimulus payments from private debt collection. It has not done so. > The Trump administration has also put private banks in charge of doling out $349 billion in loans for the Paycheck Protection Program, which are meant for small businesses suffering from the Covid-19 recession. But struggling small-business owners are running into bureaucratic roadblocks put up by some of the world’s wealthiest financial institutions, like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. * https://www.barrons.com/articles/cares-act-workers-companies-unfair-coronavirus-aid-51586983332 https://www.barrons.com/articles/cares-act-workers-companies...
perl4ever 6y ago
I'm not saying I'm very confident of it, but it could be the US policy is significantly better even if by accident. Look at it this way, people always hate to change jobs. Particularly in a time of disruption. But a time of crisis is exactly when people need to change what they are doing for the good of society. So maybe it is exactly the right thing to do, to provide a safety net for people out of work, rather than try to keep everyone doing what they were doing before.
arkis22 6y ago
This is really an illuminating moment. A lot of people have been saying that this crisis really enforces the reasoning for UBI, but that's not quite true. It's more accurate to say that the crisis really enforces that the government should have infrastructure in place for helicopter money, or paying arbitrary citizens cash. That's not even a controversial idea. The post office is meant to deliver mail to any American home (the value of the post office is probably much larger than any subsidy they receive (which is unfortunate in a small way, most of the post office budget problems are pension based. They can get away with it because they really are not worth failing)). The post office was also a nationwide bank for awhile. I also think that subsidizing payrolls was the better way to approach this problem. The PPP was a limited pool of money and favored businesses with the best relationship with their bankers. A simple approach of "I will pay you 25% of your annual income based on last years taxes plus inflation" is much easier. This is the bargain we've made though isn't it? The US is more OK with creative destruction. The question is how creative the destruction from covid is. How quickly do you need to liquidate a restaurant's assets to improve capital allocation? The answer to that might be "quicker than people form restaurants." Which suggests to me that just replacing service worker income is probably more efficient.
Nitramp 6y ago
The other angle is that firing people means businesses lose organisational knowledge. Even in relatively low skilled jobs, replacing your workforce means you'll spend a lot of money on retraining or lost efficiency. Keeping workers on the payroll means you have a much better chance of rehiring your experienced employees. Incidentally the same is true for companies: keeping structurally healthy businesses afloat means society doesn't have to deal with the loss of organisational knowledge. The different approaches taken by the US and Europe might reflect priorities in the respective societies. On the other hand, the US did spin up a payroll program, which seems to just have been rather unsuccessful, with lots of money going to big businesses. So this may just the effect of a less competent government.

hogFeast 6y ago

The US way was much smarter...although not smart either in ways. In Europe, you have companies that are functionally insolvent, that will never trade profitably again, and which are being paid not to close. I know of companies where I am that are starting to look at letting hundreds of people go...those people were paid for two months by the govt. And why? A good chunk of these people needed no help at all. The point of an unemployment system is that you focus payments on people who actually need help (btw, you can run an insurance system too...but some European countries that went this way don't have the tax base or economic structure for a true, income-substitution system). It is a typically European solution which is why some countries in the region regard 10% unemployment as a huge triumph. What most European countries have done is fire all the bullets in their gun in the first 10 seconds of a battle that will go on for a long time...this is particularly foolish given how much debt some of these countries need to roll over this year. Also, the US "money for everyone" program was equally stupid for the same reasons.

throw7 6y ago
Well, just want to point out, "money for everyone" is not true. I'm sure there are workers here on HN that did not receive any due to income.
- thephyber 6y ago
  > I'm sure there are workers here on HN that did not receive any due to income True. The income cutoff for Trump Bucks for a working single person was about what Facebook pays interns in the Bay Area.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  How terrible the govt give you money because you earned too much?
nabla9 6y ago
US economists think that US way is stupid, corrupt and inefficient. It's better to do it in European way. https://promarket.org/2020/03/24/economics-and-finance-professors-from-major-universities-write-to-congress-bail-out-people-before-large-corporations/ https://promarket.org/2020/03/24/economics-and-finance-profe...
- hogFeast 6y ago
  Yep, that it is typical of US economists who don't understand much about Europe (it typically doesn't extend beyond: so we can have our cake and eat it).
- mrep 6y ago
  How so? That article is arguing for what they think the US should do and it basically matches what the US did in fact do. The CARES act was by far a bailout to citizens directly through the stimulus checks and the extra $600 a week in unemployment and indirectly by funding payroll for airlines and small businesses. The rest is basically loans which have to be payed back and funding for hospitals and state governments.

theredbox 6y ago

Are you referring to the “KURZARBEIT” scheme?

WanderPanda 6y ago

I like to also view this as an opportunity for a more efficient resource allocation in the long run. In my view you are trading off short term stability vs. long term efficiency. To be more clear: In Germany we have a vast amount of people who think the government should guarantee most parts of their life, especially their job. Most people will stay at the same employer for their whole life, also because it is relatively hard and costly to lay people off. This leads to very static structures and wrong incentives. People even believe they are trading their time for money and not their productivity for money. I believe it can be healthy letting a shock through to that system from time to time so that a more optimal allocation can be attained. Trying to micromanage to soften a shock only introduces bias to the system reducing its natural variance, leading to a less efficient allocation.

groby_b 6y ago
You are free to leave the country if that so upsets you. Meanwhile, I'm glad I'm a citizen of a place that values people's lives over "the economy" or a "more optimal allocation".
- shuckles 6y ago
  There is a good case to make that you’re analysis is a false dichotomy.
- seibelj 6y ago
  If the government paid you to dig a hole and fill it back up, all day everyday, for absolutely no purpose, would you feel happy and fulfilled? What about if 50 years ago the government paid you to create typewriters, and because there is no change and everything is static, they are still paying you to make typewriters? Except now they go straight into the trash. The march of progress is important. Jobs need to be destroyed if they are no longer necessary. Paying people with tax dollars to continue to do the same thing for life is absurd.
  - Fjolsvith 6y ago
    Downsize government?

Barrin92 6y ago

This works because European countries are very corporatist. There is a high degree of labour organisation and governments, unions, and employers often work together to maintain say, employment rather than responding to market fluctuations. This is why German unions say in the early 2000s during Germany's "sick man of Europe" period, negotiated stalling pay raises to maintain employment. In the US (and also often here on HN) this will just be described as inefficient, ignoring market signals or something like it. I don't think it's even possible to coordinate the economy like this in the US.

hogFeast 6y ago
It requires a level of corporate control over politics that just doesn't exist in the US.
- dathinab 6y ago
  Oh, it does exist. Just not for labor unions and similar. From what I can tell corporate induced bs* laws seem to be more common there than here. (i.e. caused lobbying, not in the interest of the population)
  - joe_the_user 6y ago
    The problem is corporations exert huge influence in the US but only indirectly through feeding various ideologies. These ideologies the exalt the market and enterprises, certainly but they tend to also.not understand how actual business works (the average American politicians has been claiming government should work like a small family lumber mill for generations). Today, I can't help but think the super rich of America (at least those not slaves to ideology themselves) must be rethinking their support for extreme polarizing positions and "market fundamentalism" as the Federal government abjectly fails to meet the challenges of unified approach to disaster and conflict that is it's overall purpose.
  - hogFeast 6y ago
    That makes no sense. Look at the largest donors, unions are absolutely huge, and have a very outsized role in the US (although that isn't unusual).

gen3 6y ago

We did this though. The small business loans are fully forgivable if the business uses it to pay employee salaries.

adrianmonk 6y ago
And the loans are only forgivable if the business retains their employees. From https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relief-options/paycheck-protection-program#section-header-8 https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/coronavirus-relie... : > Forgiveness is based on the employer maintaining or quickly rehiring employees and maintaining salary levels. Forgiveness will be reduced if full-time headcount declines, or if salaries and wages decrease.

dathinab 6y ago

> But, then I suppose it would be an obstacle to companies using the opportunity to permanently trim staff. Hmm. At least not for smaller businesses. Remaining fixed cost and no income are still often enough to give a reason for layoffs, in some case also a true and honest reason. It's more like doing so doesn't fit well with (parts of) the way the US handles employment.

makomk 6y ago

I think generally those European schemes involved paying people less than if they were working normally. The UK one was 80% of people's normal paychecks, others were worse, some were presumably better. That detail seems to have been mysteriously omitted from a lot of the US media coverage.

dogma1138 6y ago
I think it’s also relevant to note that the US payout is on average higher than payouts in the EU. The only big difference is that once the federal grants are withdrawn much of Europe will have a much better social safety net to fall back on.
oakesm9 6y ago
For the UK scheme, companies can furlough staff. During this time they can't do any work for that company. The company can pay them anywhere between 80% and 100% of their normal salary and then the government will reemberse the company for the 80%. That means that furloughed staff can be paid their full salary,but the company is only on the hook for 20% of it. Anecdotally, smaller companies with few members of staff (who are financially able) are paying 100%, while most large businesses are paying 80%.

nabla9 6y ago

Anat Admati, https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/anat-r-admati https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/anat-r... a professor of finance and economics at Stanford, who specialties in debt leveraging in finance took really hard shot at the US government policy using the same line of reasonign. https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/05062020/anat-admati-perils-corporate-debt-and-how-covid-19-relief-efforts-have-gone https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/podcasts/05062020/anat-admat... >I was shocked and dismayed by the level of accountability and by the way it targeted throwing money at places that less need it and not spending it on places that do need it or in the most direct ways. If you want companies not to fire employees, you can look at examples in Europe like Denmark or England or Germany. You take over the payroll. You do not say to a hotel chain "Oh, do me the favor and don't fire the people." Just say "You know what? You can go and renegotiate your debt contract, you can renegotiate your rent," which is what every small business has to do anyway, "We will pay your employees right now, because they can't work, okay?" ... >There are a lot of people suffering in the economy that were just living paycheck to paycheck, and that includes small businesses. So the way they target the support even for small businesses is so cumbersome, is so inefficient, is so misused and abused and is so poorly governed, it's really, for somebody who's interested in governance in general for all institutions, private and government, I was shocked and dismayed by the level of accountability and by the way it targeted throwing money at places that less need it and not spending it on places that do need it or in the most direct ways > So some colleagues and I organized a letter, signed now by over 230 academics from law, economics, and finance, saying that this targeting to large corporations is completely misguided,

SamReidHughes 6y ago

This was a proposal made by Republicans, in the form of a payroll tax cut (since the first $120K or so of income in America gets taxed 7.5% on the employer side).

throw0101a 6y ago

> Much simpler to coordinate payments to a smaller number of endpoints, none of the hassle of trying to process orders of magnitude more unemployment claims, etc. Or simply have your tax agency send the cheques or direct deposit (like Canada), instead of going through banking middle-men: * application time <10 minutes * e-deposit in <5 days Many US states make in hard to apply for unemployment benefits on purpose: * https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/24/21225254/coronavirus-unemployment-benefits-pamela-herd https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/4/24/21225254/c... * https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/04/03/its-a-sh-sandwich-republicans-rage-as-florida-becomes-a-nightmare-for-trump-1271172 https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/04/03/its... * https://www.marketplace.org/shows/the-uncertain-hour/unemployment-benefits-are-hard-to-get-thats-on-purpose/ https://www.marketplace.org/shows/the-uncertain-hour/unemplo...

gruez 6y ago
>Or simply have your tax agency send the cheques or direct deposit (like Canada), instead of going through banking middle-men: I don't get it, isn't sending checks/direct deposits still going through "banking middlemen"? AFAIK the stimulus checks are direct deposited by the IRS/treasury, unemployment benefits are paid through checks/direct deposit as well.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > According to the Cares Act—the $2 trillion stimulus bill that became law last month—there is nothing preventing banks from simply claiming individual Americans’ $1,200 lifeline before it even reaches their hands, if they owe outstanding debt. While Congress is not expected to gavel back in until May, the Treasury Department could still issue regulations exempting stimulus payments from private debt collection. It has not done so. > The Trump administration has also put private banks in charge of doling out $349 billion in loans for the Paycheck Protection Program, which are meant for small businesses suffering from the Covid-19 recession. But struggling small-business owners are running into bureaucratic roadblocks put up by some of the world’s wealthiest financial institutions, like JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. * https://www.barrons.com/articles/cares-act-workers-companies-unfair-coronavirus-aid-51586983332 https://www.barrons.com/articles/cares-act-workers-companies...

perl4ever 6y ago

I'm not saying I'm very confident of it, but it could be the US policy is significantly better even if by accident. Look at it this way, people always hate to change jobs. Particularly in a time of disruption. But a time of crisis is exactly when people need to change what they are doing for the good of society. So maybe it is exactly the right thing to do, to provide a safety net for people out of work, rather than try to keep everyone doing what they were doing before.

arkis22 6y ago

This is really an illuminating moment. A lot of people have been saying that this crisis really enforces the reasoning for UBI, but that's not quite true. It's more accurate to say that the crisis really enforces that the government should have infrastructure in place for helicopter money, or paying arbitrary citizens cash. That's not even a controversial idea. The post office is meant to deliver mail to any American home (the value of the post office is probably much larger than any subsidy they receive (which is unfortunate in a small way, most of the post office budget problems are pension based. They can get away with it because they really are not worth failing)). The post office was also a nationwide bank for awhile. I also think that subsidizing payrolls was the better way to approach this problem. The PPP was a limited pool of money and favored businesses with the best relationship with their bankers. A simple approach of "I will pay you 25% of your annual income based on last years taxes plus inflation" is much easier. This is the bargain we've made though isn't it? The US is more OK with creative destruction. The question is how creative the destruction from covid is. How quickly do you need to liquidate a restaurant's assets to improve capital allocation? The answer to that might be "quicker than people form restaurants." Which suggests to me that just replacing service worker income is probably more efficient.

Nitramp 6y ago

The other angle is that firing people means businesses lose organisational knowledge. Even in relatively low skilled jobs, replacing your workforce means you'll spend a lot of money on retraining or lost efficiency. Keeping workers on the payroll means you have a much better chance of rehiring your experienced employees. Incidentally the same is true for companies: keeping structurally healthy businesses afloat means society doesn't have to deal with the loss of organisational knowledge. The different approaches taken by the US and Europe might reflect priorities in the respective societies. On the other hand, the US did spin up a payroll program, which seems to just have been rather unsuccessful, with lots of money going to big businesses. So this may just the effect of a less competent government.