Let's take McDonalds as an example. According to this they have 210,000 employees and a revenue of $21.076 billion. If we shut down McDonalds and pay their (former) employees $15 an hour, 40 hours a week, for an annual salary of $31,320 to not work, that's $6,577,200,000.
So a (worldwide) tax increase of $6,577,200,000, with $14,498,800,000 that can now be spent/invested elsewhere.
And you think that's going to introduce economic problems that will cause more suffering than is saved by McDonalds' employees not having to work? — Michael
If people don’t have money they can’t grow/buy food. They starve to death or lose their homes/education. — I like sushi
It needs addressing more closely I feel. — I like sushi
The virus may survive on surfaces up to 9 days (compared to 2 hours for the flue ... which means you can get this disease in the mail ... which in turn means if you test a Amazon warehouse you may find coronavirus, so you don't as to not make such a massive economic disruption so instead you just keep online the most efficient way to spread the virus exponentially through, perhaps low probability but super high impact, totally random infections that make entirely unexpected and unexplained clusters), — boethius
Amazon on Monday evening had informed employees of the Shepherdsville, Kentucky, warehouse that the facility would be closed for 48 hours for cleaning after it identified three workers sickened by the disease caused by the coronavirus. On Wednesday, hours before the warehouse -- called SDF9 -- was scheduled to reopen, Amazon told workers it would be idled until further notice for more cleaning, the first known case of Amazon shutting a U.S. facility due to the pandemic without a scheduled end date. — Bloomber news
”Japanese and Taiwanese epidemiologists and pharmacologists have determined that the new coronavirus could have originated in the US since that country is the only one known to have all five types – from which all others must have descended. Wuhan in China has only one of those types, rendering it in analogy as a kind of “branch” which cannot exist by itself but must have grown from a “tree”... — Amore
[bold mine]Coronavirus: US could become new epicentre of outbreak amid ‘very large acceleration’ in cases, WHO warns
"Over 46,000 infections and 530 deaths recorded, putting America on course to overtake Italy in number of cases.
...
Authorities have suggested the US is on track to eventually overtake China’s nearly 82,000 infections." — Michael
I'm giving it three days.
— Andrew M
82 000 has already passed in reality.
— ssu
Yes it has. — Andrew M
Begs the question: Who is still living normally, going out with friends and not taking any other measures than not shaking hands on the forum?Step up and tell your friends, family and coworkers that it is time to go into self-isolation now. — Andrew M
Bullshit.Wrong. The bankruptcy of McDonalds would not have a significant impact on the US economy. Nice graph showing the significance of the entire services sector, as if that's what we were talking about. — Hanover
Bullshit.
Bankruptcy of one of the most successful franchising companies operating in well over 100 countries would be a big issue. And if you think a company like McDonalds isn't important, what company you think would be then? The one you have in your stock portfolio? GM isn't in the position as it used to be, you know.
And yes, we are talking about the service sector. It was the sector that didn't suffer from the Great Recession so much and did provide work when a sector like construction collapsed. — ssu
We should have done this a long time ago! — frank
The trouble I have with this is that it's not always clear how you would separate out the two opposing views from each other when it comes to making concrete decisions relating to the economy. In case of early Trump and Johnson reactions to the crisis, they probably did have the economy as monetary value for a certain class in mind rather than the interests of the society at large. We know their ideologies.... — ChatteringMonkey
One might say, that's fine, it's just a bunch of traders, banks and the rich loosing out on making more money, who cares... but wouldn't this also have consequences for the rest of the economy so that in the end it has real consequences for the general public and the poor? And I understand that this is a 'designflaw' in the system to put it euphemistically, and that it could and should be otherwise in a number of ways... but until it is actually otherwise, it doesn't really matter right, because it still will have real consequences that are bad for the general public. — ChatteringMonkey
Secondly I don't think that by relaxing the social distancing measures now imposed by most countries, the depth of the recession would be reduced. We don't know yet how far the health crisis will go and as it is an exponential contagion, halting that growth will mitigate the worst effects of the rapid increase in infection. This is the reason why these countries have adopted these measures. Presumably their governments have been advised by specialists as to how bad it could be without action. — Punshhh
I add this precision, because lot's of people arguing for lifting the quarantine are genuinely arguing for the pile of dead bodies and genuinely don't understand why people have a problem with that.
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