The serious debate on reopening

In this morning's Washington Post, Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) called for debate on the question, "Resolved: Staying in our houses and waiting for a vaccine is actually making us worse worse off--especially the large number of "us" that can't do professional office jobs from home." As she goes on, she has to point out that, unfortunately, this debate in real life has broken down to "the all or nothing choices of 'Cancel Everything' [Against the resolution] or 'Open America for Business' [For the resolution]."

Even more unfortunately, this particular debate doesn't address the more relevant and dire question, "How do we restore an economy that was, by government fiat, required to stop doing business at thousands, if not into the millions, of establishments and our experts saying that the resulting deluge of separations was required by 'the science.' [all genuflect]" We have to answer this question soon. The vaccine will arrive soon, presumably on a pillar of fire or some other sign of the power of science, but the economy won't just rebound.

What are the options? So far we have seen business subsidy programs which, as usual, benefited largely larger firms with well-drilled legal, regulatory, and government affairs departments. According to Forbes on October 1, the airlines, which have all three favor-seeking gangs, were still planning to separate 30-40,000 workers. United has said that 2,500 of their layoffs will be "largely permanent". So, I'm bearish on business subsidies.

We have seen widespread distribution of government checks to families and individuals. This helped replace enough purchasing power to keep many on the right side of the edge, but cost $267 billion. That's $267,000,000,000 to be part of a $3.3 trillion deficit for the year ended September 30. Neither of those look like sustainable figures. So, I'm bearish on individual relief.

I hope some bright minds are on the case. I know this is not a case that is manageable by ordinary economic policy tools. I fear that it will be addressed with those tools anyway. Finding the right tools is the serious debate we really have to have on reopening.