I found the proposal for improving the CARES Act, supported here by the editors of the New York Times prudent:
Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, has proposed an American version. Under his plan, the government would pay up to 80 percent of payroll costs for each employee up to the median wage — which the Social Security Administration pegged at $32,828 in 2018.
Mr. Hawley’s whatever-it-takes plan recognizes the immensity of this crisis.
“It’s like, ‘Wow, we’re going down, down, down, down, down.’ Nobody can see the bottom,†he told The Washington Post. “I personally don’t care to find out where the bottom might be!â€
Crucially, the money would be distributed by a much larger arm of the government, the Internal Revenue Service. (The program is technically designed as a payroll tax rebate.)
The plan also would provide a bonus for rehiring workers laid off since the crisis began.
And the same aid would be available to larger employers affected by the crisis, too.
It does have a fatal problem, hwoever: it was proposed by a Republican which will probably render it DOA in today’s House while Rep. Jayapal’s considerably less prudent proposal will likely sail through.
A key problem, one shared by elected representatives, is that people just don’t appreciate the immensity of the task or its logistical requirements. Issuing checks probably isn’t the best approach, either. About 7% of U. S. households are “unbanked” while another 15% only have a tangential relationship with a bank.
There are plenty of people with the required logistical mindset, both in the private sector and public sector, and there’s an urgent need to make someone of that stamp responsible for coordinating the country’s response to the present crisis, either a general, someone in supply chain management for a large company, e.g. Apple or Amazon, or someone presently working for a big 3PL (third party logistics company, e.g. UPS).
I suspect we’ll see many, many more course corrections to the policies we’ve been putting in place over the last few months over time.
