Halt the panic to slow the pandemic
Small businesses and workers need economic security first to make rational decisions about COVID-19
Cars line up outside a coronavirus testing site run by the Illinois National Guard earlier this year. (Twitter)
By Ameya Pawar and Ted Cox
With the entire country at loggerheads over how to celebrate Thanksgiving this week — and whether to celebrate it at all in a pandemic — can we step back for a moment to discuss why people are behaving the way they are?
Economists, reformers, commentators, deficit hawks: they’re all poring over what relief package might provide the best return on investment in the economic crisis brought on by COVID-19. But the core issue is really just providing people security: the economic certainty that — with the economy basically sound — they’ll be able to get from here to there and the other side of the pandemic.
When people can’t pay bills or rent, when they have to wait in mile-long lines for food at a pantry — if not a COVID-19 drive-through test — it’s only human nature that, anxious as they are, they’re going to buy into conspiracy theories and a general distrust of government and public institutions.
When people feel comfortable, and they can pay their bills and take care of their families, they’re enjoying life. They can make sensible decisions. And conversely when you take away their basic dignity and worker protections and wages, you back them into a corner of desperation, and when you back entire segments of society into a corner the response is likely to be that they’ll fight their way out in any way possible, and not always in the most rational manner.
Communities across the state have seen that dynamic play out over decades. Factories closed due to globalization and automation; coal mines and coal power plants closed due to economic forces in the energy industry. We’ve come to recognize that those communities need help in replacing not only lost jobs but lost tax revenue in cases like that, which is why the equity provisions in legislation like the Clean Energy Jobs Act are so welcome — and so overdue.
We’ve come to acknowledge that businesses that abandon communities owe something to those areas — and those workers — after plundering them, to give them the resources to revive. Now the pandemic threatens the same sort of calamity, only all at once, not gradually over decades — damage inflicted not by greedy, ruthless owners, but by the natural disaster of a pandemic. The remedy is the same, only it has to be more immediate, and most likely more short-term. Businesses like bars and restaurants need to be granted the certainty that they’ll be supported until they can safely reopen. Their employees require the support to grant them economic security in a desperate environment.
So it’s gratifying to see President-elect Joe Biden continue to push for an ambitious COVID-19 relief package like the HEROES Act passed by the U.S. House last May. It’s heartening to hear this week that he’s pressing for any sort of relief package to be pushed through Congress immediately, during the lame-duck session after the election — in hopes it would be signed into law by President Trump, if he can return himself to the duty of protecting the American people instead of trying to undermine the election results they delivered this month.
Because when people can’t pay their bills or their rent or mortgage, when they feel their livelihoods are threatened, whether they’re small-business owners or employees of those businesses, it’s only natural that they’re going to search out and embrace conspiracy theories that offer some sort of explanation or excuse.
That results in people disdaining medical advice to wear masks and watch social distancing as impingements on their freedom. They turn Thanksgiving Into a cause rather than a celebration of the (increasingly few things in a pandemic) we have to be thankful for.
So we get people like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas and state Rep. Brad Halbrook of Shelbyville insisting that they’re defending “my home, my Thanksgiving, my freedom of choice,” with the defiant cry to “come and take it.” That is not responding rationally or reasonably to a threat posed by a pandemic that is once again raging out of control, across the state and the nation and the world right now.
Permit us to draw parallels that it’s the same sort of desperation that prompted Illinoisans to vote against their own economic self-interest in rejecting the Fair Tax Amendment. In a desperate environment, people are more apt to embrace conspiracy theories and a general distrust of government and social institutions, and act in a way counter to any reasonable response.
That’s why we have to address the general economic panic produced by the pandemic before we can tame the pandemic itself. People have to be given the security and the certainty that they’re going to be taken care of in order for them to act responsibly in a public health crisis. Otherwise selfishness and distrust flourish and work to undermine the common good.
And, as we pointed out earlier this month, the only source of relief on that scale is the federal government. Give businesses enough money to temporarily close, without worrying about lost revenue, and give aid to working people — in cash — so they don’t have to worry about putting food on the table and paying their rent. Give them that comfort, and they’ll look more charitably on the common cause of reining in a pandemic, and more sensibly on what they can do for the common good, without believing it’s them individually against the world.
We have to halt the outbreak of economic dread and desperation before we can expect people to look outside their own small struggles just to keep their heads above water. A drowning person does not act calmly or rationally. Neither does someone who sees the world crashing in due to an uncontrollable virus.