Every other country did what the Fed did for the same reason: We've experienced (and are still experiencing) a once a century global pandemic. The measures to limit pandemic deaths would have completely destroyed the economy had the governments and their associated banks not taken the measures they took to support people during this difficult time.
There is still considerable debate if those measures were actually effective. Did closing down entire industries, closing borders, making 20 year olds WFH etc really move the needle on Covid deaths in retrospect?
And even if it did, was it ethical, fair and is it a reasonable price to damage the economy and life prospects of hundreds of millions of young people who weren’t at statistical risk?
Its important because it means the current and future mess is down to bad science and politics and not an act of god.
The measures were certainly very effective under the metric of limiting deaths.
British Columbia and New Zealand have about the same population, both are rich jurisdictions. BC was relatively open (compared to other Canadian provinces) while NZ was more locked down. BC has dramatically more deaths than NZ.
And then if you compare BC, which was more locked down than various US states, BC had less deaths than them.
It seems pretty clear to me that the "lock downs" worked.
(putting "lockdowns" in scare quotes here because really the only thing BCians were prevented from doing was going to restaurants and bars. You could still go to the grocery store and home depot etc with a mask on)
If you have some other metric well I dunno, but I don't think there's any better metric than deaths avoided.
> There is still considerable debate if those measures were actually effective.
Not really. I agree with the thrust of your post but there is definitely no considerable debate being had on this topic, because Near-Zero COVID is the only acceptable policy, and saving lives at any cost along with it.
Not sure what you mean here. In the U.S. there has been considerable debate, vaccines are free, safe and available same day. Finally we have given up on almost all safety measures as long as the healthcare system can handle the load.
Can you be specific in the change you want or which debate isn’t allowed?
Thanks to you authoritarians deciding for us, we will never know for sure. Comparing countries with similar densities (like Sweden and Finland) and different COVID policies seems to point out to a resounding no.
Most likely we would have had a few more mostly elderly deaths, we won't have ruined the mental health of a generation and we won't have enriched big pharma even more.
Even with the pandemic going on it would have been better to suffer during the pandemic than cause a recession. The same people who were hit by lockdowns would be hit 10 times worse by a recession.
Employment numbers in my jurisdiction are back to normal and thanks to the sort of government intervention we're talking about very few companies went out of business. Where I live everything is pretty much "back to normal."
The government successfully shut down big parts of the economy, kept people alive, and avoided companies going out of business. They did it.
If there is any recession, and it remains to be seen if there will be, it won't be because of local factors, but rather because goings on in China and supply issues stemming from our over-reliance on their manufacturing.
It's not the Feds fault, it's the pandemic.