This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 24th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

So many of the practical problems that have followed from this pandemic were problems made

inevitable by laws already on the books.

From licensing to wage restrictions to housing restrictions, many of the people struggling

to make ends meet in the middle of this ongoing crisis are doing so in part because of their own government.

Cato's Michael Tanner contributed an essay to our Pandemics and Policy Project.

We spoke last week.

States and localities have been essentially in charge of the pandemic response.

What have they done wrong when it comes to trying to make room for everybody and hope that this recovery benefits a broader scope of people?

Well, let's recognize at the start that both the pandemic and the government response

to the pandemic and the various closed downs and various restrictions have had an impact across

the entire economy. We're all poorer to some degree because of the

pandemic. That said, we clearly have two different types of economy. One is for people

who have sort of tech jobs or white college jobs, the type of jobs that can easily be transferred to work from home.

And then there's the type of jobs that are sort of lower wage jobs, the type of jobs that require a lot of dealing with the public, small businesses.

And they've, one side has done pretty well, the other side has largely been hurt.

We know that for example that a large number of small businesses have closed down and the people

who worked in those have been highly affected. We know that communities of color have been hard hit both by the pandemic itself and by the aftermath.

About two-thirds of Latinos have lost jobs or lost wages.

One or the other because of this, about 44% of African Americans have either lost jobs or

lost wages as a result of the pandemic and its aftermath.

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