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The Pandemic Recession Is Showing America’s Economic Problems
The “pandemic recession” has shown us that the U.S. has two economies.
The first one is made up of college educated, knowledge-based employers and employees. They work with ideas, facts, figures and spread sheets. These businesses and their employees need only an internet connection to continue unabated. Their incomes, for the most part, have not diminished.
Our second economy is based on having to be physically present in a business. These are the people that are restaurant servers and cooks, retail clerks in stores, airline personnel, and hotel workers whose businesses have been closed. Many of the tradespeople that service these types of establishments have been affected. They are the ones with diminished earning capacity.
An Outmoded Model
Yet what has been the government’s response? A totally inadequate one based on an economic model that no longer is relevant. If the country continues down this wrong path, even much of the first U.S. economy will fall like that of the second.
Our government’s programs are mired in an old economic model that has not been true since the 1960s. Even President-Elect Biden’s supposed expanded social programs are based on those antiquated employer-based models. From unemployment insurance to…
