Economists Encourage Direct Cash Payments To Speed Recovery

EDITOR NOTE: When you centralize data--that is, taking all particularities and blending into an average ‘soup’ representing the ‘common good’--you fail to take into account the individual needs of the particular. We all live in the particular, not according to the ‘average.’ That’s the failure of centralization: it confuses ‘bottom up’ for ‘top down.’ In the meantime, it crushes individuals by failing to acknowledge their ‘particular’ needs. The economists below call this high-level efficiency and innovation. Perhaps it is. Beyond a certain point, however, it can be called other things: centralization, institutional overreach, even socialism.

(Reuters) - Direct cash payments can improve financial security, boost consumer spending and may speed up the recovery, according to a letter from a group of economists calling on U.S. policymakers to keep providing direct cash payments to Americans until the economy is stronger.

The stimulus payments should be issued automatically, based on certain economic indicators such as the unemployment rate, until there is enough evidence that the economy is recovering, the group of mostly left-leaning economists said in an open letter organized by the Economic Security Project and The Justice Collaborative.

“The first round of economic impact payments were a lifeline that helped some get by for a few weeks,” the economists wrote. “Even after businesses start to re-open and jobs begin to come back, there will be significant economic fallout, and demand will continue to lag if people don’t have money to spend.”

The letter was signed by 153 economists, including Jason Furman, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers during the Obama Administration; Claudia Sahm, a former Fed economist; Darrick Hamilton from the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University; and Indivar Dutta-Gupta, co-executive director at the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality. Some of the signatories are advising the campaign of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Originally posted on Reuters