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Amour Propre's avatar

So, after reading numerous posts from you and Matt Y, I am well convinced on minimum wage, the recovery act, not fearing inflation much, doing away with the filibuster, etc. Well done! My remaining question is how do we convince Joe Manchin? Any thoughts?

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Brandon Berg's avatar

This is exactly why it should be targeted. For stimulus, sending everyone an $x check makes sense. But when there's no need for stimulus, and most people have lost no income or even gained income (due to the unemployment bonus). Most people don't need any extra $1400 to make ends meet; for those who do, it's probably not enough.

It sounds to me like you're suggesting that the government should send out money to compensate people for pain and suffering, but it's simply not possible to make everyone whole. The pandemic reduced our overall utility frontier. "People feel bad" is not a good reason to add an extra $1 trillion or more to the deficit with no macroeconomic benefit.

I suppose you can say that we can make it up by taxing the rich even more heavily than we already do, but at that point, aren't you just using the pandemic as an excuse to do the things you wanted to do anyway?

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