Wednesday Night Owls. Jason Furman: What it will take to build back a better economy?
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Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week Jason Furman is professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He served as chair of the CounWednesday Night Owls. Jason Furman: What it will take to build back a better economy?
Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week Jason Furman is professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration. At Foreign Affairs, he writes—The Crisis Opportunity. What It Will Take to Build Back a Better Economy: [...] The natural disaster is not over. The number of new COVID-19 cases remains high and continues to rise. The most important economic policy for a full recovery is to end the disaster itself. This means reducing disease transmission through mask use, social distancing, testing, contact tracing, isolating infected people, improving treatments, and, eventually, the wide distribution of a vaccine. Whatever amount of money the government needs to spend to achieve these objectives would easily pass any form of cost-benefit test. The United States can ill afford not to spend the tens of billions of additional dollars necessary to combat the virus itself. The economic problems associated with COVID-19 are likely to persist, however, even once the virus itself is under control. In addition to the initial “natural-disaster recession,” which has already begun to taper off, the United States is now suffering a more normal recession linked to high unemployment and reduced purchasing power. The number of unemployed people who were temporarily laid off (which was a result of the natural-disaster recession) has fallen from a high of 18 million in April to nearly three million in October. In contrast, the number of unemployed people who are now permanently laid off (which has to do with the more normal recession) actually rose by almost three million over a similar period. Read more