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The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the federal government. If you are going to shutter businesses and put people out of work, you need to

The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the federal government. If you are going to shutter businesses and put people out of work, you need to pay the business owners and the employees who you have affected. Staying economically viable vs staying medically viable should have never been a tradeoff people had to make here, and Americans should all remember that when the next election rolls around.

war1025 6y ago
> Americans should all remember that when the next election rolls around Unfortunately, for most people the truth is that they "like their representatives, it's all the rest that are corrupt" Plus Washington is close enough to a 50/50 split right now that you can always just say it was the other party holding everything up.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  Our election processes have never been fair. Big money has typically been the largest factor. This year solidifies it .. at least for half the population. The American psyche has been split in two by a corrupt and runaway media.
TheBlight 6y ago
But the federal government didn't shutter any businesses. You can thank the state governors, county officials and big city mayors for that.
- OminousWeapons 6y ago
  My point is that the governors and mayors always had to weigh the economic damage they were doing to people whenever they made a shutdown decision, which resulted in erratic, complicated, and somewhat nonsensical shutdown orders. If the federal government had backstopped the economy properly and compensated any business or person directly affected by a shutdown, then the governors / mayors would have been able to take more coordinated, effective action. You can't maintain aggressive shutdowns if every day of your shutdown is destroying peoples' bank accounts.
  - TheBlight 6y ago
    What in your view would've been more effective action? Do you not think enough businesses are closed or enough masks are being worn?
  - nradov 6y ago
    Most governors and mayors didn't perform a rigorous cost benefit analysis before making shutdown decisions. Many of the lockdown orders were arbitrary and capricious, full of exemptions for politically favored groups. These were largely faith based policies without proper scientific backing from an evidence-based medicine perspective. Free money from the federal government wouldn't have improved that situation. If state governors want to shut down businesses then state governments should be issuing relief payments.
    - lumost 6y ago
      When we’re talking about 30% of national GDP and millions of lives, then turning it into a state v state issue doesn’t sound like a recipe for long term stability.
    - ryathal 6y ago
      A lot of free money went to governments, my state largely squandered that money, and hoped more would come to actually help people. They used it to avoid any sort of budget cuts for the current and previous years, and even set up a tuition grant that helps our governor look better at achieving campaign promises.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    The way the US is structured makes this very difficult. We're not a country of countries like the United Kingdom, but the US is a country of States. Despite our federal solidification over the past century, states still have a lot of autonomy. Passing marijuana laws that contradict Federal law, is probably the most prevalent example of this. The Federal government tried to create PPP programs, but look at what happened. Multi-million dollar franchises pulled in huge chunks while small restaurants got nothing. It's the 2008 bank bailouts all over again. It's like PS5/nvidia graphics cards scalping for businesses. The corruption flows through every system, and the blame can be focuses on businesses with the means and people and legal staff to take advantage of the situation at the expense of every possible competitor.
- hpkuarg 6y ago
  Big city mayors, some of whom then turned around and dined indoors at $400 a plate kind of restaurants.
  - TheBlight 6y ago
    Don't leave the governors out! They're enjoying the party too!
just-juan-post 6y ago
The FEDERAL government didn't do anything. STATE and LOCAL governments did. Why should the federal government bail out states for their actions? And yeah I will remember all this during the next election. I was a Democrat all my life until early 2020 and now I'm done. I'll be voting against them from now on.
- TheBlight 6y ago
  While overtly this fell on the state and local governments, I think it's probably safe to assume the party line came from the top of the party. Most of the governors and local officials are all just along for the ride themselves in the hopes of appeasing the party and maybe becoming president one day.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Not saying you're wrong, but... what particularly did the Democrats do (or not do)?
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Listening to Elizabeth Warren in 2019 (who I respected tremendously as someone who previously announced she was a "capitalist to her bones") put an intersectionality spin on every policy item did it for me. At first, the whole "person of color" thing was just weird, and now I find it incredibly grating and alienating. Like I can't listen to one of her speeches without feeling "othered."
    - tptacek 6y ago
      It's a real problem with her, the language stuff; I cringed every time I saw her say "Latinx" during the campaign, which is a term Latinos overwhelmingly reject, and was originally intended to refer to LGBT Latinos. Obama landed some glancing hits on her presentation style in his most recent book, too.
nradov 6y ago
The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the state and local governments. The federal government didn't force any businesses to close. There is a huge variance between states in pandemic control measures. If businesses are still open in Florida then why should Floridians pay federal income taxes to subsidize closed businesses in California? And states do have options for funding relief at the state level. For example they could temporarily raise income taxes on the wealthy for the duration of the pandemic. Or issue pandemic bonds.
- slg 6y ago
  >The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the state and local governments. The federal government didn't force any businesses to close. The state and local government had to act entirely because the federal government had no real plan. Someone is going to fill the decision making vacuum, but it is a problem when the people making the decisions don't have the financial power to make the right decision. The federal government is the only government in the US that had the power to pay people to stay home and experts were telling us that was the right decision 9 months ago.
  - nradov 6y ago
    You appear to be laboring under a misconception. The responsibility to act on public health measures has always been primarily at the state and local levels. Under our federal system, the federal government doesn't even really have legal authority to order lockdown measures. Granted the federal response has been an appalling mix of corruption and incompetence, but the federal role is mostly just advisory anyway. State governments have the power to pay people to stay home. They might have to shift funding from other areas or raise taxes in order to do so.
    - ant6n 6y ago
      The argument isn’t about power in the sense of authority, but power in the sense of having the tools to control the situation.
    - 6y ago
disgrunt 6y ago
It was state governors who shut their states down. Not the federal government.
- bearjaws 6y ago
  The state isn't in any position to offer emergency loans / bailouts. The federal government needed to work with the states that were being hit hardest by Coronavirus, when they were being hit. Instead some got a random $1200 check and some PPP loans, when many didn't even need it yet. States had a choice, leave everything open and deal with the loss of life, and still suffer as people would be going out less. OR shut down to help prevent deaths and hope the federal government would help (which it should have). Instead it became a political battle to give corporate immunity, and nobody got anything after March.
djsumdog 6y ago
> The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the federal government It's more complex than that. The UK is keeping things stable/frozen, but with nothing being produced, the value of their money is shifting. You cannot keep paying people to do nothing. You have people in jobs where they are still employed, saving tons (because there's nothing to spend it on) and record buying of future e-waste (Going back to the 2000s, PS3 prices were back to normal two weeks before x-mas Christmas. PS5s are still $1000+ on eBay), and the income inequality is growing between those who happen to be in safe industries and those who weren't .. and it's arbitrary. Nothing has changed for the manager at a Wal-Mart, or a UPS driver or an engineer, but it has for the restaurant manager or someone who owns a small corner store in California. The completely arbitrary and almost random lock-down decisions have crushed all small business, giving over their entire customer bases to large big box stores. The people with their small businesses don't want handouts. They'll take it sure, but they want to work. Some have shifted and found new creative ways to make money. That's the nature of capitalism. You do what you have to, within the limits we've evolved over the past 100 years (no more child labor; pure capitalism without regulation is bad), to offer goods and services people want. But many are struggling. In contrast, the earlier larger unemployment payments provided a perverse incentive to keep people from returning to jobs that had reopened. Lowering them a bit has helped those return to jobs that were there, but it's been devastating to those who have nothing to go back to. We cannot just inject money. Social welfare has been a disaster in many respect. Only only need to watch modern documentary that break the bubble: "What Killed Michael Brown" and "Uncle Tom" to see how the perverse incentives from badly constructed government systems actually hurt a lot of low income communities and destroyed families. There is a lot of talk about "A great reset," used in many countries to indicate a global agenda to fundamentally change economic models. Make no mistake, people at the top with influence are not going to give up or redistribute their wealth. Bezos, Gates and others at the top will hold on to their wealth. But reconstruction could destroy people under a certain income threshold if it's not done correctly. People need merit and value, and the draconian COVID regulations have removed personal agency from the masses.
- mindslight 6y ago
  What has been gradually removing personal agency from the masses is this ever-growing debt black hole, accumulating for decades. Small business owners aren't feeling some pressing desire to continue their craft during the pandemic, beyond that of anyone with a passion. What's really driving their desperation is needing to pay rent, as the banks continue operating as normal, demanding their periodic tribute, and threatening to confiscate businesses if they don't find some way to pay up. You said "people with their small businesses don't want handouts". The problem is that they've internalized rent as some inherent fact of life, while viewing anything that could mitigate rent as a "government handout" - despite decades of government financial meddling being responsible for this jam! The direct solution was/is to suspend all rent/mortgages denominated in USD, and let the pain accrue to those who are usually benefiting from vacuum-up economics. Instead, as always, disinvolved capital was given a pass (along with a huge bailout!) while the political machine went to work dividing the productive members of society to distract from their real enemy.
kthxbye123 6y ago
The whole game for the social sociopaths is to pretend that the federal government had no obligation to provide for people's livelihoods during lockdown - which they absolutely did, obviously. This was wholly intentional, to sabotage health-and-safety conscious Democratic local governments, and force them into the Sophie's choice of mass unemployment or mass death among their constituents (local GOP leaders, for the most part, of course didn't actually care about mass death OR mass employment, since their constituency is the handful of billionaires who fund the whole party and right-wing ideological apparatus; so they were able to further sabotage the health-and-safety efforts by simply refusing to implement any). The state and local governments that shutdown did the right thing - they put the health and safety of their populations first. The federal government failed them by defaulting on its obligations. It did this intentionally.

war1025 6y ago

> Americans should all remember that when the next election rolls around Unfortunately, for most people the truth is that they "like their representatives, it's all the rest that are corrupt" Plus Washington is close enough to a 50/50 split right now that you can always just say it was the other party holding everything up.

djsumdog 6y ago
Our election processes have never been fair. Big money has typically been the largest factor. This year solidifies it .. at least for half the population. The American psyche has been split in two by a corrupt and runaway media.

TheBlight 6y ago

But the federal government didn't shutter any businesses. You can thank the state governors, county officials and big city mayors for that.

OminousWeapons 6y ago
My point is that the governors and mayors always had to weigh the economic damage they were doing to people whenever they made a shutdown decision, which resulted in erratic, complicated, and somewhat nonsensical shutdown orders. If the federal government had backstopped the economy properly and compensated any business or person directly affected by a shutdown, then the governors / mayors would have been able to take more coordinated, effective action. You can't maintain aggressive shutdowns if every day of your shutdown is destroying peoples' bank accounts.
- TheBlight 6y ago
  What in your view would've been more effective action? Do you not think enough businesses are closed or enough masks are being worn?
- nradov 6y ago
  Most governors and mayors didn't perform a rigorous cost benefit analysis before making shutdown decisions. Many of the lockdown orders were arbitrary and capricious, full of exemptions for politically favored groups. These were largely faith based policies without proper scientific backing from an evidence-based medicine perspective. Free money from the federal government wouldn't have improved that situation. If state governors want to shut down businesses then state governments should be issuing relief payments.
  - lumost 6y ago
    When we’re talking about 30% of national GDP and millions of lives, then turning it into a state v state issue doesn’t sound like a recipe for long term stability.
  - ryathal 6y ago
    A lot of free money went to governments, my state largely squandered that money, and hoped more would come to actually help people. They used it to avoid any sort of budget cuts for the current and previous years, and even set up a tuition grant that helps our governor look better at achieving campaign promises.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  The way the US is structured makes this very difficult. We're not a country of countries like the United Kingdom, but the US is a country of States. Despite our federal solidification over the past century, states still have a lot of autonomy. Passing marijuana laws that contradict Federal law, is probably the most prevalent example of this. The Federal government tried to create PPP programs, but look at what happened. Multi-million dollar franchises pulled in huge chunks while small restaurants got nothing. It's the 2008 bank bailouts all over again. It's like PS5/nvidia graphics cards scalping for businesses. The corruption flows through every system, and the blame can be focuses on businesses with the means and people and legal staff to take advantage of the situation at the expense of every possible competitor.
hpkuarg 6y ago
Big city mayors, some of whom then turned around and dined indoors at $400 a plate kind of restaurants.
- TheBlight 6y ago
  Don't leave the governors out! They're enjoying the party too!

just-juan-post 6y ago

The FEDERAL government didn't do anything. STATE and LOCAL governments did. Why should the federal government bail out states for their actions? And yeah I will remember all this during the next election. I was a Democrat all my life until early 2020 and now I'm done. I'll be voting against them from now on.

TheBlight 6y ago
While overtly this fell on the state and local governments, I think it's probably safe to assume the party line came from the top of the party. Most of the governors and local officials are all just along for the ride themselves in the hopes of appeasing the party and maybe becoming president one day.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Not saying you're wrong, but... what particularly did the Democrats do (or not do)?
- rayiner 6y ago
  Listening to Elizabeth Warren in 2019 (who I respected tremendously as someone who previously announced she was a "capitalist to her bones") put an intersectionality spin on every policy item did it for me. At first, the whole "person of color" thing was just weird, and now I find it incredibly grating and alienating. Like I can't listen to one of her speeches without feeling "othered."
  - tptacek 6y ago
    It's a real problem with her, the language stuff; I cringed every time I saw her say "Latinx" during the campaign, which is a term Latinos overwhelmingly reject, and was originally intended to refer to LGBT Latinos. Obama landed some glancing hits on her presentation style in his most recent book, too.

nradov 6y ago

The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the state and local governments. The federal government didn't force any businesses to close. There is a huge variance between states in pandemic control measures. If businesses are still open in Florida then why should Floridians pay federal income taxes to subsidize closed businesses in California? And states do have options for funding relief at the state level. For example they could temporarily raise income taxes on the wealthy for the duration of the pandemic. Or issue pandemic bonds.

slg 6y ago
>The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the state and local governments. The federal government didn't force any businesses to close. The state and local government had to act entirely because the federal government had no real plan. Someone is going to fill the decision making vacuum, but it is a problem when the people making the decisions don't have the financial power to make the right decision. The federal government is the only government in the US that had the power to pay people to stay home and experts were telling us that was the right decision 9 months ago.
- nradov 6y ago
  You appear to be laboring under a misconception. The responsibility to act on public health measures has always been primarily at the state and local levels. Under our federal system, the federal government doesn't even really have legal authority to order lockdown measures. Granted the federal response has been an appalling mix of corruption and incompetence, but the federal role is mostly just advisory anyway. State governments have the power to pay people to stay home. They might have to shift funding from other areas or raise taxes in order to do so.
  - ant6n 6y ago
    The argument isn’t about power in the sense of authority, but power in the sense of having the tools to control the situation.
  - 6y ago

disgrunt 6y ago

It was state governors who shut their states down. Not the federal government.

bearjaws 6y ago
The state isn't in any position to offer emergency loans / bailouts. The federal government needed to work with the states that were being hit hardest by Coronavirus, when they were being hit. Instead some got a random $1200 check and some PPP loans, when many didn't even need it yet. States had a choice, leave everything open and deal with the loss of life, and still suffer as people would be going out less. OR shut down to help prevent deaths and hope the federal government would help (which it should have). Instead it became a political battle to give corporate immunity, and nobody got anything after March.

djsumdog 6y ago

> The blame for the situation lies squarely at the feet of the federal government It's more complex than that. The UK is keeping things stable/frozen, but with nothing being produced, the value of their money is shifting. You cannot keep paying people to do nothing. You have people in jobs where they are still employed, saving tons (because there's nothing to spend it on) and record buying of future e-waste (Going back to the 2000s, PS3 prices were back to normal two weeks before x-mas Christmas. PS5s are still $1000+ on eBay), and the income inequality is growing between those who happen to be in safe industries and those who weren't .. and it's arbitrary. Nothing has changed for the manager at a Wal-Mart, or a UPS driver or an engineer, but it has for the restaurant manager or someone who owns a small corner store in California. The completely arbitrary and almost random lock-down decisions have crushed all small business, giving over their entire customer bases to large big box stores. The people with their small businesses don't want handouts. They'll take it sure, but they want to work. Some have shifted and found new creative ways to make money. That's the nature of capitalism. You do what you have to, within the limits we've evolved over the past 100 years (no more child labor; pure capitalism without regulation is bad), to offer goods and services people want. But many are struggling. In contrast, the earlier larger unemployment payments provided a perverse incentive to keep people from returning to jobs that had reopened. Lowering them a bit has helped those return to jobs that were there, but it's been devastating to those who have nothing to go back to. We cannot just inject money. Social welfare has been a disaster in many respect. Only only need to watch modern documentary that break the bubble: "What Killed Michael Brown" and "Uncle Tom" to see how the perverse incentives from badly constructed government systems actually hurt a lot of low income communities and destroyed families. There is a lot of talk about "A great reset," used in many countries to indicate a global agenda to fundamentally change economic models. Make no mistake, people at the top with influence are not going to give up or redistribute their wealth. Bezos, Gates and others at the top will hold on to their wealth. But reconstruction could destroy people under a certain income threshold if it's not done correctly. People need merit and value, and the draconian COVID regulations have removed personal agency from the masses.

mindslight 6y ago
What has been gradually removing personal agency from the masses is this ever-growing debt black hole, accumulating for decades. Small business owners aren't feeling some pressing desire to continue their craft during the pandemic, beyond that of anyone with a passion. What's really driving their desperation is needing to pay rent, as the banks continue operating as normal, demanding their periodic tribute, and threatening to confiscate businesses if they don't find some way to pay up. You said "people with their small businesses don't want handouts". The problem is that they've internalized rent as some inherent fact of life, while viewing anything that could mitigate rent as a "government handout" - despite decades of government financial meddling being responsible for this jam! The direct solution was/is to suspend all rent/mortgages denominated in USD, and let the pain accrue to those who are usually benefiting from vacuum-up economics. Instead, as always, disinvolved capital was given a pass (along with a huge bailout!) while the political machine went to work dividing the productive members of society to distract from their real enemy.

kthxbye123 6y ago

The whole game for the social sociopaths is to pretend that the federal government had no obligation to provide for people's livelihoods during lockdown - which they absolutely did, obviously. This was wholly intentional, to sabotage health-and-safety conscious Democratic local governments, and force them into the Sophie's choice of mass unemployment or mass death among their constituents (local GOP leaders, for the most part, of course didn't actually care about mass death OR mass employment, since their constituency is the handful of billionaires who fund the whole party and right-wing ideological apparatus; so they were able to further sabotage the health-and-safety efforts by simply refusing to implement any). The state and local governments that shutdown did the right thing - they put the health and safety of their populations first. The federal government failed them by defaulting on its obligations. It did this intentionally.