A Better Way to Spend 1 Trillion Dollars in Response to Covid-19

[Roboramma]

One thing that should have been funded (or still should be funded) is a massive testing program.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Romer has a workable plan: https://roadmap.paulromer.net/paulromer-roadmap-report.pdf

To control this pandemic, and any future pandemic, the U.S. should make the investment necessary to test people every two weeks, which would mean 25 million tests per day on an ongoing basis. It should also have a surge capacity of twice this amount, which would allow us to test every Amer- ican every week if needed. At the moment, the U.S. is testing around 150,000 people daily, and to make matters worse, we are testing the wrong people. Instead of testing those with symptoms, our urgent priority should be to test people who might be asymptomatic spreaders of the virus.
Achieving this level of testing is difficult, but entirely feasible. The sooner we focus our efforts towards the necessary steps to making testing ubiquitous, the sooner we can reopen the economy and restore people’s confidence in the future. It is the only path to certainty that makes it safe to return to work, safe to visit your grandparents, safe to put your child back in school, and a myriad other things that have become dilemmas during the pandemic.

At scale, a reasonable estimate would be a $10 cost per test for labs. 20 million tests per day translates into about $73 billion per year. Along with other costs for infrastructure, training, and production of supplies, I estimate the government will need to allocate $100 billion to the development of a testing strategy. I urge Congress to include the $100 billion in the Phase 4 coronavirus stimulus bill to generate a revenue stream for labs as soon as possible. The market cannot independently solve this problem. The need for a new revenue stream that creates neces- sary incentives for labs to innovate at the scale possible is inescapable.
For each month of lockdown, the U.S. economy suffers a loss of $500 billion from lost output that month and lost capacity to produce in the future. Lifting the lockdown without a clear containment strategy will have relatively little financial impact due to continued fear and uncertainty (we may cut the loss to $400 billion a month) and will undoubtedly carry extraordinary human cost. A temporary relaxation of lockdown will offer little economic benefit because it won’t give consumers or firms the necessary confidence to plan and invest.
The economic argument for investing in an approach we know will provide certainty and safety is undeniable. A $100 billion annual investment in testing until all Americans have been vaccinated would pay for itself many times over, and it would provide the necessary revenue stream for labs to rapidly expand testing capacity.

 

[Craig4]

What about a system where you can keep the unemployment checks coming with the $600 a week kicker but you work at testing stations or get trained to be a work from home contact tracer? We'd have to fix the supply chain issue for testing supplies and components to make it feasible. We'd need a system so you didn't have to call from your own phone number but neither problem seems insurmountable.

 

[Leftus]

So people ARE spending money on grocery delivery, then?

I've been using the curbside pickup, which has zero fees attached. I could use the delivery service, which is also free, but that would mean that my dog doesn't get to go for RIDES! and where is the fun in that? Currently, it's a two day lead time for the free pickup or delivery. Order Sunday for a Tuesday pickup. And the really good news is that after I order and up to 4 hours before hand, I can add up to 20 items! Up from 10! up from 2! Never understood that, I get the time window thing, but if I add 30 items with a 24 hour lead time, I'm not sure how that would break the system.

Even after this is all over, I'm probably still going to do the pickup thing and only run into the grocery store to grab something I need right now. I still get amused when someone asks me where I want them to put my groceries? The trunk is open, the meathead dog is in the back seat. Yes, put it next to the pitbull. It will be fine.

 

[Leftus]

What about a system where you can keep the unemployment checks coming with the $600 a week kicker but you work at testing stations or get trained to be a work from home contact tracer?

Wouldn't both of those be jobs, and thus no longer unemployed? In the federal system, I'd put the starting pay in the GS4 GS5 range. Possible a ladder to 7.

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/2020/general-schedule/

So everyone out of work, can do the math and see if 14 to 15 and hour (depending on locality) with benefits replaces the wages they lost.

 

[Meadmaker]

What about a system where you can keep the unemployment checks coming with the $600 a week kicker but you work at testing stations or get trained to be a work from home contact tracer? We'd have to fix the supply chain issue for testing supplies and components to make it feasible. We'd need a system so you didn't have to call from your own phone number but neither problem seems insurmountable.

Exactly the sort of thing that could be done. The sort of massive testing program that Roboramma referred to is completely doable. It's just expensive. However, it's not as expensive as giving away money to all of us, and "expensive" actually means "workers have to be paid", which means that people are working and earning income.

As Leftus said, it wouldn't really "keep the unemployment checks coming", it would be more of a "start the employment checks coming".

And oh, by the way, raise the taxes needed to pay for it. It has become a religious belief among the GOP that taxes kill jobs, but that's nonsense. I call it a religious belief because it is irrational and faith based, as opposed to evidence based. Taxes fund jobs. Ok, fine, we might have to have some sort of deficit, even a rather large deficit temporarily, but right now we're throwing money all over the place, hoping someone catches it and does something useful with it, and pretending that it never has to be paid for.

It's madness.

And when it's all said and done, it's vote buying.