Pretty sure those who got the enhanced checks would say it had an impact on their lives.
Hard to not put that in the “plus” column.
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Or it was the right time to terminate them as the support that had been very much needed was no longer required.
I still argue there are tens of thousands of businesses being propped up by government programs that, were that support not there, those business would disappear.
I also suspect if many of those businesses disappeared, no one would notice / they would be replaced by existing businesses.
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Not just this. The median net worth is not the correct number to use. The deaths were concentrated in poorer communities and also in nursing homes. Either of those conditions would lower the average net worth of the deceased.
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Unemployment down below 5% again. Yay!! Inflation has looked better in the past three months too. I’m very happy with the amount of spending Congress was in favor of to get us through this. I think major lessons were learned in 2008. We should have spent a lot more money back then.
The number one goal for the goal for the economy (and for everything) right now is ending the pandemic. 7% of US Adults are in the “wait and see” category on the vaccine. Gotta see how we can convince them. And then we gotta start cracking into the remaining 16% or so. Some of them will be convert due to mandates. Not sure about the rest.
Beyond that, we need to get the world vaccinated. The WH said last month that we’re buying half a billion more doses for the world Good stuff. Let’s do more.
on supply chain and the delays - don’t we get a lot of produce or other spoilable food from abroad? the delays can ruin those perishables, right?
Increased pay will probably still not fix stuff like this:
Until some employers change their “employees owe me” mindset, expect some places to continue to struggle to find people no matter what the pay is.
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This. The balance of power right now favors the workers, in many sectors and many geographies. People aren’t groveling for jobs and putting up with abuse when there are four other jobs they can get this week.
I hope this whole idea of employers not being jerks sticks around.
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I know that there are bad managers in the world, and I don’t doubt that there are some cultural problems regarding employer/employee relations in this country, but these Twitter threads always give off strong, “And then the whole bus got up and clapped.” vibes.
While I admit there’s the aspect of Twitter is representative of the entire world or Reddit is representative of the entire world that’s easy to get caught up in, my experience is that it’s a whole lot more common than people want to admit.
Just looking at Clone #1 and Clone #2 in my family, both have worked fast-food retail. Both have less than zero urge to go back because of how shitty managers were in their respective places. Pay could be $15, $18, $20 an hour and they simply won’t do it. [My rant on them being nearly 18 and not working as they finish HS and try to decide what comes next omitted.] Good pay only goes so far when you hate where you work, and I think we can all speak to that from personal experience.
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Lucy posted this in a COVID thread…12% of survivors had not returned to work after 12 months. That is a lot of workers if you translate it over to the US (and elsewhere).
https://www.jwatch.org/na54014/2021/09/14/covid-19-survivors-1-year-later-suboptimal-health-and
Yep. So it seems the numbers are small.
I’m kind of hoping the remaining 16% simply catch it and get immunity that way. I think that’s what has been going on the last couple months.
At 12 months, 12% of COVID-19 survivors who had been employed prior to their hospitalization
I get about 900,000 cumulative hospitalizations. Probably more than half over age 65.
Say 12% of 400,000 under-65 = 48,000
That’s a lot of people but a pretty small percent of the workforce.
Hmm, I glossed over the hospitalizations piece…how did China react to COVID initially - didn’t they have COVID hospitals they locked everyone up in for a few weeks if they tested positive? I wonder a bit about the hospitalization number relative to infections.
Also - we only have 900k hospitalizations with 700k deaths in the US? That’s…surprising. I think a lot of state level data may be missing from that…clicking on CA, TX, many states are N/A. CDC is showing 3.2M.
So higher than 48K but ???
Good points. The “this looks funny” sensor should have gone off in my head. I didn’t look at the state detail.
In my state, cumulative hospital admissions are 4x cumulative deaths.
If CDC has 3.2 million hospitalizations —
.12 x .5 x 3,200,000 = 192,000
Still less than 0.2% of the workforce.
Or, they’ll die from it. The critical hope to have is that they don’t all go to hospital at the same time.
More possible is that they’ve already had it. One in three Americans are estimated to have caught COVID by the end of 2020, four times higher than the “official” counts.
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Yep. My hope is that we’re mostly past that stage. Enough people have partial immunity from vaccines or past infections that spikes will be rare. The NYT map by county is really interesting. Places that used to be dark orange - FL, LA, TN, are turning light tan. The current outbreaks are in rural places. Bad locally, but fewer people.
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We have some longer term trends in the works too. We had a labor shortage prior to the pandemic. No one wanted to discuss it but it was building up.
Couple of issues:
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We aren’t replacing our population due to lower birth rates
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Limited immigration is crimping labor supply.
We also have some long term supply chain issues that are going to push on pricing.
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We aren’t the only rich country in the world anymore. There is wealth that can compete with us to consume goods all over the world
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The rest of the world isn’t replacing it’s labor force with new births either.
I don’t think so. Maybe we define “shortage” differently.
I’d say “shortage” means “not enough workers to produce the necessities of life”. We clearly do far, far better than that.
You use “shortage” to mean … ?