[jmcgough]

We have an extreme wealth disparity with many having no savings and no social safety net. We can't force everyone to stay home for months, the economy would collapse.

China maintained draconian levels of control - citizens had cards with their risk level, and were tested frequently when they went to a public space. Have symptoms or some reason to believe you might be infected? You were quarantined from your family and not released until 4+ hours later. If they needed to be kept overnight, they had special hotels to quarantine people in. Citizens there actually listen to what the government tells them to do, and dissent is stamped out. In the states, a lot of people openly don't trust the government.

If we tried to control peoples' lives like that, our citizens would riot. You'd have armed citizens refuse to leave their homes.

They also did things that are unimaginable here - they built an entire hospital in 10 days. They have infrastructure and equipment from SARS that they were able to mobilize.

We aren't China, and we can't accomplish what they've done. Not in eight weeks. We are not prepared for this.

[oefrha]

> You'd have armed citizens refuse to leave their homes.

That would be great actually. The problem is armed citizens refusing to stay at home.

[Balgair]

>We have an extreme wealth disparity with many having no savings and no social safety net

I was under the impression that the wealth disparity in CHina was even more extreme than in the US. How brainwashed am I?

[threeseed]

> We can't force everyone to stay home for months, the economy would collapse.

You could. Just pay everyone $1000/month until it ends.

[bufferoverflow]

Paying $1000/month to everyone is $327 billion/month or $3.9 trillion every year. With most people not working you'd have to print that money, destroying the dollar.

Also $1000/month is not even close to enough in most areas to live off. Rent + food + health insurance is a lot more than $1000 for most people.

[rnotaro]

And what do you pay the businesses that are closed?

[bb88]

We've long been pursuing the supply side economics for far too long. Massive tax cuts and bailouts. Banks came back rather quickly after 2008. The citizens, well, it took a while.

I'm beginning to think that if businesses can't survive for 6 months in a catastrophe, maybe it's better that they die. Moral hazard, you know.

If businesses die, you still have the people to build more businesses. If people die, you'll have neither.

[RHSeeger]

That's an awful lot of people's life savings in their small business that goes poof. A lot of the businesses that can't survive are leaving behind people that are not capable of bringing them back, and people that won't be employed there afterwords.

[bb88]

So a lot of people's life savings have gone poof, not just small businesses.

[pcr0]

The staff can be put on unpaid leave since they're getting paid by the government and the rents could be negotiated since the landlord should be getting their mortgage payments paused. I believe those are the main expenses for a brick-and-mortar business.

[threeseed]

In Australia today banks will freeze small business customers' loan repayments for up to six months. If you can extend this to rent and other business repayments then many of them should survive.

[JadeNB]

> You could. Just pay everyone $1000/month until it ends.

Stealth UBI?