On Wednesday, I spoke to @SenSanders about the brutal hole the pandemic has put the country in and what must be done about it. The suffering is truly eye-popping, and staggering, and yet I don't think most Americans appreciate it. A thread... (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
The suffering is much, much bigger, much broader, and will likely be longer-lasting than the pandemic, but let's start with the disease itself. There are almost 180,000 dead, according to a new "excess mortality" calculation. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
The best coronavirus modeler suggests roughly 80,000 more deaths from the disease by November. covid19-projections.com/us
Many more are sick, of course, with as many as a third of those diagnosed with the disease still unable to work weeks later.
But it is the suffering beyond sickness and dying that is most striking, and, I think, least understood.
The official American unemployment rate is about 11% but the true figures are higher. More than 40 million Americans have lost their jobs since the beginning of the pandemic.
Last week, 1.3 million Americans filed new unemployment claims; this week, it was 1.4 million. That makes 18 straight weeks the figure was over 1 million. The 18 straight weeks are the 18 weeks of highest American job loss ever recorded.
More people have lost their jobs in every single week of this pandemic than ever lost their jobs in any single week in the history of the statistic. The previous record of about 700,000 was set during the peak of Great Recession. The pandemic has broken it every week.
For most of these last few months, the struggles of those who’ve lost jobs has been temporarily alleviated by very generous extended unemployment benefits. But those benefits are set to expire at the end of the month.
The last few months have been tragic, and horrifying, and surreal, with echoes, wherever you looked for them, of the Great Recession. Depending on what additional relief is legislated in the next few days, the next few months may well feel more like the Great Depression.
In late June, after most of the country began reopening, small businesses were closing faster than they had during the depths of lockdown. 5.4 million have already lost health insurance, thanks to job losses, and workers are still getting laid off.
More than 20 million Americans could face eviction just between now and September—twice as many as lost their homes in the fallout from the financial crisis, which was a generational economic trauma arising from the collapse of the housing market. nymag.com/intelligencer/…
Between the beginning of the pandemic and late May, food insecurity in America doubled, according to research from Northwestern University. 23 percent of Americans, that research found, were now food insecure. That’s 76 million people. news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/…
Drug deaths, already at an all-time high in 2019, have risen 13% so far this year. And according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 37% of Americans now report symptoms of anxiety and depression—a three-fold increase from just last year, when only 11% did.
In recent weeks, the school districts of Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Baltimore announced they would not be conducting in-person schooling at any point in the 2020-2021 calendar year—to name just four of the biggest school districts in the country.
And we already know remote-learning is, at best, an iffy proposition for the country’s well-off kids and a devastating set-back for everyone else. Not to mention their parents.
As the feminist legal scholar Joan Williams told the Wall Street Journal, “opening economies without schooling and child care is a 'recipe for a generational wipeout of mothers' careers.'" wsj.com/articles/women…
And while the first rounds of pandemic relief authorized by congress have been, by sticker-price value, tremendously generous, the amount of spending is also a sign of just how deep a hole the country is in.
Roughly twice as much money has been spent in the last six months in an effort to keep the country’s heads just above water than was spent in the entire 2009 stimulus bill and in an entire decade of Obamacare—combined.
That has allowed us to keep our heads above water, but just barely, and the support — most of it — is about to end.
And while states and cities have already initiated austerity budgets to deal with inevitable tax shortfalls in the absence of meaningful aid from the federal government, the new bill seems to promise no local aid whatsoever. politico.com/news/2020/07/2…
The most problematic are the stingier unemployment benefits. According to one proposal being considered, the average recipient, the Washington Post’s Heather Long calculated, would see weekly income fall from $930 to $330.
And yet the Republicans controlling the next round of relief talk about unemployment benefits as though they are holding back recovery. But the problem isn’t the behavior of the workers, or what incentives they face, it’s the state of the labor market.
"We have never been in a position like this before. This really is unprecedented," @SenSanders told me. "We should not surrender on this." nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"And the role that I could play is say to Joe Biden, say to Chuck Schumer, say to Nancy Pelosi, 'You know what? You are going to have an extremely progressive first 100 days. We have to keep faith with the American people in their time of pain.'" (x/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…
* Correction: these announcements were just about doing no in-person classes as schools open in the fall, not for the full duration of the school year.
