[throw149102]

What's going to happen when these 37.2 million jobs are lost? Are these people just going to starve on the streets? Do they have financial resources that they didn't know they had? I find myself frustrated whenever reading about the job losses because things are always phrased in the abstract, like "The agency expects that $METRIC will be down 40% in the next decade." I don't know what that means for the people who are actually going through this catastrophe.

I also seriously question these sorts of projections, especially out as far as a decade. There's so many variables and unknowns, and I'm not certain how the IRS arrives at this conclusion, and it's not clear what assumptions they're making in their projections.

What I really need is a recent comprehensive source on how COVID is affecting the economy. Right now all the information is coming in piece-meal and I have no idea what to make of it all.

[imtringued]

This has already happened before. The great depression will simply repeat itself. However, there is a big if. Will the worst case scenario actually happen? It is entirely possible that more people switch to remote work over the long term.

[poletopole]

We’ll witness the birth of what I call the “Shadow Economy” evolve from the reputation economy. Since companies can’t exist, they won’t. Instead workers will find work where they don’t pay income or sales taxes which could be a global federated crypto network. If you remove taxes from the equation and replace them with what might be next generation smart contracts that work like cash (offline) then really government will be the one out of a job. Credit card processors and banks are already anticipating this future with their recent crypto card standard. In the BLM riots my chase bank actually was burned to the ground. There definitely is a vacuum to be filled and I think most out of work just need a platform that works without trust.

[randomdude402]

Good luck convincing anybody that moving crypto through their bank is going to enable them to avoid taxes.

Their has always been a shadow economy, and it runs on cash.

[poletopole]

I wasn’t implying anything nefarious by the term “shadow”, only that it stands in the shadow of the reputation economy. I also meant that two outcomes might exist: 1. Something like ether or 2. The banking system would corner the market.