After 4.4 million more Americans filed for unemployment in the last week, the total number of claims since the novel coronavirus pandemic hit—and brought with it a necessary economic lockdown—is over 26 million. All job gains in the decade since the Great Recession have been wiped out. The people who've lost their jobs have been funneled into beefed-up (but often overwhelmed) state unemployment systems. With some luck, they'll qualify for benefits to supplement the onetime $1,200 check from the IRS. And then, when the cataclysm recedes, they'll have to try to get a job again.

But though the economy has stopped, the bills have not. Even in a scenario where we were to make the mistake of broadly reopening now, people would not go out to restaurants or fly on airplanes as normal. They don't want to get sick. It's a pandemic. Markets are mortally wounded. The state must step in, even in a country as poisoned against its own democratic self-government as the United States has become. People have severely reduced, or completely eliminated, incomes. They can't pay their bills, even if they keep piling up.

The most absurd extension of this involves housing. Many jurisdictions have enacted moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures, meaning people who can't pay their rent or mortgage can't be thrown on the street during a pandemic. This is a good first step, but the effect is to create a financial cliff after three months. How are people whose income has been affected, or destroyed outright, supposed to pay three months in back rent this summer when they probably will struggle to pay one month's? Even if they get unemployment and the $1,200, there are other expenses. They might have kids, or an elderly relative to take care of, or healthcare costs, or student-loan debt. We're a nation where huge numbers of people live paycheck to paycheck, and for a lot of people, the paychecks aren't coming in anymore.



Already in April, a third of renters nationwide missed their payments. It's only going to get more severe in May, and some folks I spoke with last week are essentially trying to turn an inevitability—people will not pay their rent because they have no choice—into a political act: they're organizing a rent strike in New York (and elsewhere) to force their political leadership to cancel rent for that period. This is an alternative to the current state of affairs, wherein we tell people we won't evict you now, we'll evict you three months from now. The same goes for the suspension of mortgage payments. From here, I'll let this guy take it away.



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This is Vic Dibitetto, a New York comedian with a phenomenal accent who is exactly right. A onetime payment of $1,200, as he well illustrated by listing off all the financial obligations a head-of-household might have, is not sufficient. The government should set up recurring payments for the duration of the crisis. This acknowledges reality and also would function as a temporary experiment in universal basic income. Andrew Yang cheers.

But then Dibitetto got into the mortgage question with some aplomb. It's a similar problem to the rent delay: how are people supposed to make three or four months' worth of payments when they don't have as much, or any, money coming in? The Wall Street Journal reported on this phenomenon Thursday, tracking the false promise of federal mortgage relief which has left many borrowers to be "told they will have to make lump-sum 'balloon' payments" when the forbearance period ends. "If mortgage servicers follow through with demands for lump-sum payments," the WSJ tells us, "borrowers could be pushed into default, damaging their creditworthiness and compounding the financial pain inflicted by the downturn." People can't pay out of no fault of their own, then take further damage to their financial health in the bargain. It's absurd, greed and capital run amok because political leaders in both parties have allowed it to happen through (bad or purposeful) design.

The rent strike movement is growing ahead of May 1, when millions cannot and will not pay regardless. Richard Tsong-Taatarii Getty Images

Dibitetto even laid out a solution here that Free Market Types can jibe with, at least if they're not, in his words, "greedy cocksuckers": add the three months of mortgage payments onto the end of the length of the mortgage contract, so people get their money to the bank a decade from now rather than in the biggest moment of financial hardship they likely have ever experienced in their lifetimes. (Unless, of course, they got even more royally screwed during the economic cataclysm a decade ago.) That solution might be harder to implement on rental agreements, which will usually have shorter spans with less time for people to recover before the bill comes due at the end. The state may just need to step in and support (small-to-medium-sized) landlords over the three-month period. But it's a similar principle of necessity. "You'll get your money, you shitbags," he said. "It's just delayed."

The real beauty of this is how simple Dibitetto made it. So much of our financial system is a maze constructed so the average consumer cannot navigate it—and maybe, in the process, realize they're getting screwed. This is what you'd find in the intricate predatory schemes of, say, Wells Fargo, which one of our two political parties once thought was worth fighting back against with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Elizabeth Warren issues a forlorn smile.) You can guarantee some Industry Insiders will pop up with some convoluted explanation of why this solution won't work (for them). But this crisis has put it all in sharp relief. The relentless greed of some lenders is running up against the immutable fact that people cannot pay, and it has nothing to do with Personal Responsibility or Freeloading. People can't work, they can't get paid, so they can't pay. End of. Surely, the relentless, grinding power of capital in this era of anarcho-capitalism cannot overcome reality itself? Don't answer that.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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