Not sure if it's really sinking in for people yet, but "the economy" on the other side of COVID just isn't going to have as many full time jobs as it did before.
There are still 10.7 million fewer people with jobs than there were in February before the pandemic, although just over half of the jobs lost in March and April have now been recovered. At this rate, it would take the economy another 16 months to gain back those jobs, although economists say that job gains get more difficult for every month that the recession lasts.
All 10.7 million of those jobs are not coming back. That isn't part of the plan. The bosses have already won the pandemic and are going to be fine without most of us.
We aren't in the early, completely catastrophic early days of the crisis anymore. People making above $60k are basically back to work, according to the Opportunity Insights Data. The group that is still badly struggling is low-wage service workers. pic.twitter.com/XSRhjokFTc
— Jordan Weissmann (@JHWeissmann) October 1, 2020
What's left to do now is for the rest of us to "just get used to" the new slightly shittier normal. Which is why, even today, as the nation woke up the news that the President himself has tested positive for the virus, the push is on to end the emergency and impose a sense that the current state of affairs is just the way we live now and that it's time to get on with that.
Which is why, despite Nancy Pelosi's performative "optimism" that the Trump diagnosis changes the political dynamic, the thing to understand is that help is not on the way. The US economy... insofar as what it can produce for the benefit of poor and working class people... slid completely off the edge of help in 2008 and has not been brought back from that. The pandemic is just another step in normalizing the status to which most of us have been relegated. We're never coming back from this. We aren't really even expected to.
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