Yes, Minimum Wage increase is decisivly not a good idea at the moment. Especially if you do it in big jumps. I love high minimum wages for the obvious economical and human benefits, but you have to increase it carefully so that the economy can adopt to it. A pandemic with closed shops certainly has enough other shit going to adopt to that you should not put more on the table.
It's good for your health to do some training. But not on the day you already had an heart attack!
Purely anecdotally (I am yet to see a proper economic study done on this), the business facing portions of the last big stimulus - the PPP and such - did not work very well. At least that is what the business owners seem to suggest, and many of them went out of business anyway.
Again anecdotally, people swear that the last round of checks + the unemployment insurance went to meet daily necessities. There aren't many Mustachians out there who will put that money straight to VTSAX.
My impression (without the backing of proper research) is that stimulus given to the workers go further in stimulating the economy than those focused on the capital owners.
Don't worry, others have done the research and yes, both intuitive thought and logic, and the research result are on the same side.
If you give money to poor people they spend it. If you give it to rich, they "invest" it (meaning in most cases the capital market, not an investment into production capacities - for the obvious reason in an economic crisis that there is no need for more capacity).
Biden wants to add even more trillions of dollars to our debt by sending out more money to people and doubling unemployment benefits. I voted for him, but I oppose both of these plans. I hope they can stop him.
Many people make the mistake of thinking of it as debt (and I too used to think of it that way years ago), it's not. I really suggest people read the Deficit Myth. Hypothetically let's say the US Gov't spends $3T to just give people money without doing anything else. The Fed instructs banks to mark up people's checking accounts (this is what is often referred to as printing money). $3T of Treasury securities is then issued. That's it. The fed gov't doesn't borrow the money. The $3T is what is considered added debt even though it's not.
The only limiting factors as far as gov't spending goes are inflation and whether we have the resources (labor, factories, machinery, etc) to absorb the increased spending. If you want to argue against increased stimulus for these reasons fine but to argue against them b/c of federal "debt" is just being misinformed.
Out of the trillions the government spends each year, the interest on the national debt (almost $28 trillion) is now approaching $400 billion - even with historically low interest rates. So adding another $3 trillion in debt, even at very low interest rates, adds tens of billions in annual interest. And if interest rates go up even moderately, that $400 billion in interest could balloon up to $500 or $600 billion or more. That is a real cost that has to be paid out of federal revenues and takes money away from other priorities.
Funnily enough that is not necessarily so. If you go down to the ultimate basics.
The state has the dept.
The National bank, that has created that money, is the holder.
What happens if you forfeit this debt?
The state has less debt.
The National Bank has less "money that we destroy when the state pays it back".
Not a single cent is actually moved in the
real economy.
doubling unemployment benefits so that people have no incentive to return to work when they can sit at home
With this sentence I always wonder:
To what work should they go if nobody is hiring them?
Tax cuts alone do not account for $28 trillion in debt. Reduced revenue is part of the equation, but the bottom line is that it's been decades since we had a balanced budget.
On that topic, regarding to towns in the US, watch this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IsMeKl-Sv0How America Bankrupted its Cities - The Growth Ponzi Scheme
