Can Government Spending Save the Economy?

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2020

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the American economy plunges toward a recession, economists and policymakers are triaging proposals to stanch the bleeding. All of their ideas will cost money the government doesn’t have. That leaves Democrats and Republicans with two major questions: How much should be borrowed for bailouts — and what spending is needed to avoid permanent economic damage? Guest: Ben Casselman, an economics reporter at The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily Background reading: Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, has urged Congress to spend more on economic relief — even if doing so means increasing the federal deficit. He warned that the United States was experiencing an economic hit “without modern precedent.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is Daily.
0:09.3	Today, saving the U.S. economy from the fallout of the pandemic
0:15.5	may require a historic infusion of cash. Ben Castleman on the debate over that spending.
0:24.8	It's Monday, May 18th.
0:35.0	Ben, we're talking to you on Friday morning and a bunch of big, ugly economic numbers just
0:42.7	came out this morning. So we wanted to sift through them with you.
0:46.0	Yeah, it's been a pretty dark morning for the economy.
0:49.6	Where do you think we should start?
0:51.0	Maybe the place to start is actually on Thursday.
0:54.9	We turn out of the economy nearly 3 million more Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week.
1:00.8	But when we learned that another 3 million Americans had filed for unemployment benefits.
1:08.4	That's more than 36 million people in two months.
1:11.5	We're two months into this crisis and yet we are still losing millions of jobs every week.
1:19.5	For eight straight weeks now, jobless claims have been in the millions with 3 million more people
1:24.1	filing for unemployment last week.
1:26.2	Right, every week, every week.
1:28.8	This did not happen naturally.
1:30.9	All of these companies didn't just go out of business because demand disappeared.
1:35.1	We turned our economy off.
1:36.9	Right, think about New York, think about the state of California.
1:39.6	If you ran a restaurant, a mini golf course or a clothing store, there's a really good
1:44.7	chance you would have laid your workers off.
	...

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