Post 126 - July 15, 2020
Day 126…
It’s tax-day. I’m not quite sure how this happened, but even with a three-month extension we didn’t get anything into the mail until yesterday at the last minute.
It’s the same with teching a show. You fill the time you’re given. Too short, too long, it doesn’t matter, there’s always a last-minute scramble to get to the first performance.
Anyway, they are in and done, and we are both relieved.
I’m guessing that next year’s taxes are going to look very different from this year’s taxes.
American Theatre magazine published a story yesterday with a study that shows that people’s willingness to return to theatres is actually trending down. At the moment only 9% of the people surveyed said that if theatres reopened now that they would be likely to attend. Moving forward in two-month increments, that number slowly rises, but even by this time next year only 64% said they would be very likely to go out and see a show.
Those numbers only reflect what people THINK that they will feel in the future. As time progresses, obviously, people’s opinions will change. It seems clear, however, that despite people’s apparent willingness to gather together outside, gathering together inside still seems like a bad idea.
Age is probably a factor as well. The people who are gathering together outside seem, on the whole, to be relatively young. Theatre goers tend to be older and, therefore, in the higher risk categories, so more cautious.
All of us who are currently unemployed are facing the end of our PUA, or Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, payments at the end of the month. That extra payment on top of our regular unemployment checks seems to me to be the only thing that is allowing everybody to eat out occasionally at all of these newly re-opened restaurants all around the city.
Without that payment, Michael and I will need to use our combined regular unemployment checks for our mortgage and maintenance payments. We are lucky enough to have some savings, but if we need to draw from those for a year to buy food, things are going to get extremely tight. The memory of those frozen margaritas from Arriba Arriba a couple of days ago may have to sustain us for a good long while.
That’s just what’s facing two extremely privileged white guys on the Upper West Side. What is that going to mean for everybody else out there who may not have savings?
What happens to all of those restaurant workers and owners when we all stop being able to eat out? What happens to people whose health insurance is running out and who won’t be able to keep up payments? What happens to people with kids to support?
Many US households are taking advantage of the new laws that were passed which allowed a delay in mortgage payments for up to 90 days. As of July 5, 4.1 million households were taking advantage of this and were in forbearance. Not all of them missed payments, but they are enrolled in the program. Michael and I enrolled for safety’s sake, but we never actually used it.
A Census Bureau survey shows that in addition to these people in the program, an additional 8.4 million people missed a mortgage payment this past month. These numbers are more heavily concentrated here in the northeast but also in the southeast where we were hardest hit in the early days of the virus. Numbers like these are usually a signal, as they were in 2008, of a looming recession.
Between 2007 and 2010, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 4 million families lost their homes due to foreclosure in the housing crisis. According to them some of the other factors that were happening then, such as subprime mortgages, have become rarer so we should be in a stronger state to weather this particular crisis. Even with that, though, another group called CoreLogic predicts that delinquency rates could quadruple over the next year and a half or two years putting as many as 3 million homeowners in danger of foreclosure.
For many people whose jobs do not appear to be coming back at any point in the near foreseeable future, foreclosure is going to be the inevitable result if the PUA payments aren’t extended.
So, where does all of this PUA money come from? It comes from us.
The government only has money to spend on anything because we give it to them every year when we pay taxes. When the US Air Force buys a new plane, they are using our money. That’s our plane. When we vote for somebody, we are, in effect, choosing how we want our money to be spent.
It’s all of our money, but do you know whose money it isn’t? The President’s. In one of his debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016 the topic of his tax returns unsurprisingly came up. Mrs. Clinton pointed out that there were only two years where the now President’s tax returns were a matter of public record. He had needed to release them to get a state casino license.
He had paid no taxes at all either of those years - offsetting his income by also posting losses.
“That makes me smart,” he said. He went on to say that he was a better overseer of his funds than the government ever could be. He didn’t think he should give money to the government. “It would be squandered, too. Believe me.” It appears to be extremely unlikely that the President has ever paid any taxes, maybe ever.
We, as a nation, were not called upon to pay our annual taxes until today. That means that the US has borrowed money to be able to continue operating during this last three-month tax delay.
In June we hit a new record. We spent $864 BILLION dollars more than what we took in. In the last nine months our deficit has risen to over $2.7 TRILLION. Historically, we used to worry when the national deficit started getting close to a third of that.
“Big government deficits are the only thing keeping the U.S. economy on life support and anti-deficit rhetoric threatens to pull the plug,” said Nathan Tankus, research director of the Modern Money Network. “The alternative is mass defaults, evictions and bankruptcies which will devastate the United States.”
At the beginning of this year, the total US debt stood at over $26 trillion dollars. It has increased by over $1 trillion each year since 2007. A certain level of debt is good for the economy. Why? Honestly, I can’t say that I fully understand it.
When the debt is greater than the Gross National Product, however, it’s apparently not so good. Our GDP last year was $21.42 trillion dollars, a considerably lower number than our current debt. Heaven only knows where our GDP is going to be this year.
The Administration is desperate for schools to re-open right away so that parents can get back to work right away so that people can begin earning right away so that they can then pay taxes on all of it.
If revenues are low now, what are they going to be like come next April when none of us will have earned anything close to what we earned last year?
The White House has just launched a fancy new campaign to encourage us to all get back to work that is being spearheaded by the President’s daughter. It’s called “Find Something New”.
Your industry is shut down and you can’t find a job? Find something new! There are great new careers just out there waiting for you!
Aerospace Engineering Technician!
Broadcast and Sound Engineering Technician!
Diagnostic Medical Sonographer!
There is a story about Queen Marie Antoinette of France that may or may not be true. When told that the peasants of her country were so poor that they couldn’t afford bread, she replied, “Well, then let them eat cake!”
It takes a long time to establish a career, even longer if it isn’t one that you are naturally called to. It also takes a lot of schooling which costs a lot of money.
The President’s daughter who, like Marie Antoinette, has been handed everything she has ever had on a golden platter, is possibly the last person on the planet who should be advising the people of the United States on how to find work.
We appear to be locked in a loop. The only way the economy is going to remain healthy is if we all participate in it. The only way that we are going to be able to participate in it is if we have the money to do so. In three short weeks, we will no longer have that money.
As a country, we are way over our heads in debt. It seems like the only path we can take to get out of it is to go further and deeper into debt.
I do not profess to be any sort of economic expert at all. In fact, I would urge anybody who knows more about this than I do to please correct me if I have misspoken anywhere here. What I can see, though, is that until we get the pandemic under control, any attempt we make to repair and shore up our economy is bound to fail. In fact, if we continue to follow the White House’s directive to simply ignore COVID-19 completely, we are likely to make our economic situation much, much worse.
Jersey Boys cannot realistically go back on tour until everywhere it stops is safe enough that audience’s feel OK about venturing out of their homes and gathering together inside a darkened theatre. It can’t just be in some places it basically needs to be everywhere. People are anxious and scared and need reassurance. They need to believe that they will be safe or else they will simply stay at home. It will take time and help for that confidence to return.
The only way to keep us all afloat until then is to subsidize us.
As rewarding as a career in Aerospace Engineering must be, I don’t see that, personally, as a way forward for me.
I have worked in the theatre for 38 years. It’s what I know.
I’m fairly confident that Michael and I will figure out how to get through the next year. Not quite sure how, yet, but I trust we will be able to come up with something. I fear that many of my colleagues, however, are going to have a more difficult time with it than we are.
A friend of ours is distributing postcards for people to fill out and send to our representatives in the Government. We want to urge them to continue the PUA payments. It can certainly be argued that they may not need to be as high as they currently are, but they need to keep coming.
Michael’s going to walk down and pick up a batch for us to fill out and mail.
The time for asking for assistance has passed. We need to demand it.
They’ve just gotten all the money we’ve all sent them.
Now they are going to have to give it back.