Marshall and Saga here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

This week we're really excited to bring you an episode with Heather Long. Heather is

an economics correspondent at The Washington Post. It was really valuable for us I think

and I think we were valuable for you guys as listeners is. Heather is an actual reporter.

So we have people on like Matt Stoller our last episode where they're talking about their

hypotheses, their thesis, how they think things are going to play out. But Heather because

she's actually writing about the economics of the coronavirus and how the actual job

picture is going to look is they would bring in people's actual stories and really mix

it in with data. So we started off with just the very really harrowing point that right

now we have a 14.7% unemployment rate in terms of last month's jobs report. And she also

goes into how if we actually look at the broader sort of macroeconomic factors that unemployment

rate is probably closer to 20%. The other thing that I was really interested in was the

discussion over how small businesses and then different industries are going to cope

with the lockdowns. So is that restaurant that you've grown up next to for the entirety

of your life? Is it going to survive the crisis? Are movie theaters, you know, ride share

apps, I mean all those sort of businesses we've grown used to are they going to be in

the same sort of state after the lockdowns end? And everybody listens to the podcast

knows that one of the things that concerns me most is about the government response to

this pandemic. And that's something that Heather's kind of nonpartisan expertise was really

great to discuss with just the size and the scope from her perspective of the long term

fiscal implications of the government spending package. We're not the same country that

we were in 2000 and after 2008 were a different country after the coronavirus crisis. And the

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