Pub. 17 2020 Issue 2

Issue 2 • 2020 13 O V E R A C E N T U R Y : B U I L D I N G B E T T E R B A N K S — H E L P I N G N E W M E X I C O R E A L I Z E D R E A M S businesses and these cities and states are now in a far worse position economically than if they waited it out. Restaurants that managed to survive in March and April, only to open and face a downturn in July, are much less likely to persevere. Just in the immediate term, food purchased in the expectation of reopening will not get used. Workers brought back will be sent home. The start and stop were economically and emotionally jarring, and it risks a wider failure. It also has put all other businesses at greater risk by increasing the amount of virus. It makes it hard to send people back to offices or other less per- ilous activities. This hurts local economies even further, and this damage was precipitated by depriving them of a safety net in the initial bill.” Additionally, the CARES Act was the greatest upward transfer of wealth in American history. This is a country in which middle and lower-class people have been getting hammered economically for decades, and we have just seen the greatest upward transfer of wealth, the long-term effects of which have yet to be felt. Americans who make less than $75,000 per year received a one-time $1,200 stimulus pay- ment. At the same time, the Federal Reserve, in mid-March, essentially decided to fully socialize the funding markets, pumping trillions in liquidity into them on a weekly basis. Now, we have had a complete decoupling of the financial markets from everyday people. The Dow Jones and S&P have largely rebounded to where they were pre-pandemic because the Fed has fully backed them. Meanwhile, an estimated 27 million people lost health insurance between March and May, millions are losing employment every week, and there is an impending rent and mortgage crisis. Now, any claim that the stock market has any relation to the economic fate of the aver- age American is beyond absurd. The reality of having impend- ing economic conditions that could rival the Great Depression while the stock market is soaring highlights wildly misplaced economic priorities. Our lack of a coherent response to this crisis has led to an inability for states to deal with it in a uniform fashion, so some states have contained the virus while others have allowed it to get completely out of control. The administration, after a month or so of attempting to deal with the pandemic, chose to give up when they should have been most engaged with how to solve the crisis, even ceasing to talk to top scientists and doc- tors around them. This is unacceptable behavior from individ- uals tasked to be public servants. That response seems to have bled into local governments, as certain governors and mayors were acting as if the pandemic was over in mid-May, leading many citizens to act in the same way. This kind of behavior and lack of critical thinking from elected officials should cause