[ad_1]
A member of President-elect Joe Biden’s coronavirus task force said on Wednesday the United States could manage the pandemic by imposing a prolonged economic lockdown with the government compensating workers for lost wages.
Dr Michael Osterholm pitched the idea in an interview with Yahoo Finance, explaining that a four to six week shutdown of small and medium-sized businesses could lower the number of infections.
Osterholm said the federal government was in a privileged position to use the borrowed money to pay for such a foreclosure program.
“When you look at the personal savings rate in this country, it’s now gone from around 8 percent to over 22 percent,” Osterholm said. “We have a large reserve of money that we could borrow.”
“We could be paying a bundle right now to cover all wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses from small businesses to midsize businesses,” and losing to lower levels of government, Osterholm said.
Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease & Policy at the University of Minnesota, said other countries in Asia, New Zealand and Australia have instituted similar lockdowns.
“Then we could really watch ourselves explore the availability of vaccines in the first and second quarters of next year and bring the economy back long before that,” he said.
[ad_2]
Source link