Unemployment is higher than it’s been since the Great Depression. Here are 11 steps that could help fix it.
The American economy is in crisis, with record-setting new unemployment insurance claims likely pushing the overall jobless rate to its highest point since the Great Depression.
And even as President Donald Trump talks optimistically about “opening up” the economy again, the serious plans for doing so make it clear that even under the best-case scenarios, there’s going to be no rapid return to normal.
Developing and distributing a vaccine for Covid-19 will likely take at least a year, and until that happens, no edict from the White House is going to change the fact that significant sectors of the economy are going to be hamstrung by either state and local closure orders or basic individual or community-level caution about avoiding crowded places and unnecessary outings.
Meanwhile, the recession itself can easily become a self-propelling machine. People who lose jobs can’t spend money, which reduces others’ incomes. State and local governments are strapped for cash and need to cut back, which creates another cycle of falling incomes and spending. Since the virus is global, the United States can’t export its way out of the problem. And since this collapse is happening with the Fed’s main policy rate already at zero, there’s no easy lever to push to generate an automatic bounce-back…
To read the entire article from Vox, click https://www.vox.com/2020/4/13/21216106/economic-recession-unemployment-coronavirus
