I'll probably be away from twitter for at least the next week. So, before I go, a quick rant about how policymakers should be *way* more worried about the economy.

I worry that:
1) The U.S. economy has already suffered a lot of harm, and our policies for alleviating that harm continue to be inadequate.
2) There's a significant risk that the U.S. economy will suffer more harm from resurgence of the virus, and policymakers aren't prepared.

Back in March, it seemed like we had a rare consensus. Businesses and individuals would have to disrupt their daily economic activities for the sake of the broader community. Therefore, the broader community owed them economic support, to try to make them whole.

In retrospect, some parts of the policy response worked surprisingly well. The financial markets remained stable, thanks to the aggressive actions of the Fed. Personal income actually went up, even as the economy crashed. We sent out millions of checks in a matter of weeks.

But the economy is still in very bad shape. We still don't know how many small businesses will end up bankrupt. States and localities are facing unprecedented budget crunches. And over 1 in 8 workers is still unemployed.

My first worry is that lawmakers aren't committed enough to alleviating the economic harms that have already occurred. There's no plan yet for keeping states afloat, or for making sure that workers' expanded unemployment benefits don't expire abruptly at the end of July.

Even in the best case scenario—if the virus continues to subside, and more and more people can return to normal life—we still won't have done enough to fix the economic harm so far from COVID-19.

And that's the best case scenario. My second worry is that we're not economically prepared for what happens if the virus doesn't subside, and especially if there's a second wave in the fall.

In March, lawmakers had to scramble to put together a policy response. This time, it doesn't have to be that way! Lawmakers should already be developing contingency plans (and possibly automatically triggered policies) for what an economic response to a second wave looks like.

We have time to come up with better plans. We should be thinking about ways to get money out faster. We should be thinking about how to expand UI in a way that's less dumb than "$600 a week." We should be thinking about business support programs that are less clunky than PPP.

I understand that elected officials have an incentive to reassure people that the economic recovery is proceeding swiftly. But they should recognize that the actions we've taken so far haven't been enough, and that we'll need to do even more if things turn for the worse.

Anyway, sorry for the long thread. None of this is original to me, but I just don't think people are sufficiently aware of how bad the situation is.