Sam Parr and the host debate whether the government will bail out airlines, hotels, and other hard-hit sectors during the COVID crisis. They discuss a proposed $850 billion stimulus and a "blue-collar bailout" of direct cash to service workers, with Parr wrestling with whether market forces or government aid matters more when unemployment could spike dramatically.
One really interesting thing that's happening is what does this mean for various businesses? What does this mean for the overall economy? And I'm not going to pretend to be an expert. I don't know what's going to happen. Probably nobody does, but there's definitely better people than me at predicting. So let me just put out— put that out there from the beginning. But I will say some of the interesting things that I've been reading, and I'll share that with you guys. And then if you know more, great, keep going beyond that. So the first is the prospect of bailouts. So there's all these different industries— cruise lines, airlines, hotels, casinos, movie theaters, sports leagues— that are not gonna survive this thing, or they're gonna have a lot of trouble because we're not like 2 weeks away from this ending. The— I think the New York governor came out today and predicted that— they said that the curve looks like in 45 days this is gonna peak. So a month and a half, the patient curve peaks, and that's just the peak, it still has to sort of decline all the way back to normal from there. So a month and a half from now, that's when they're projecting this. So all these businesses are having trouble, and a lot of people believe that we're gonna have to do a bailout of the airline industry, hotel industry, casino industry. What do you think about that?
Well, I have two points. The first is bailout. I'm conflicted. Relatively— I don't know, I'm not hardcore, but I'm right of center in terms of capitalism, where I'm like, let the weak go down and let the strong get stronger. It's really hard. I, I don't know, I haven't made my opinion yet because I was very much against a lot of socialist stuff. And then when I see our, our, our rich country hurting and there are people that can help us, I'm like, man, what do we do here? So Right. I, I, I'm, I'm, I'm having to reflect on my beliefs and this is, uh, changing them.
And so there's two interesting things going on. So the first is what I call the blue-collar bailout. So I, I tweeted this, uh, two days ago. I said, I think we're gonna need a blue-collar bailout, which is a lot of people who go to jobs, retail jobs, uh, they work in these casinos, they work on these cruise ships, they work in the stadiums, whatever. They're not going to be able to withstand being out of work for a month or two months or whatever. And that's going to really hurt the economy because it's a huge percentage of, you know, citizens in the country. I said we've seen bailouts when it comes to big car companies, energy companies, but we've never seen a blue-collar bailout. Banks, you know, the government rushes to help the sort of institutions that are deeply tied in with them, but will they help the constituents? And today, for the first time, they discuss you know, a potential stipend that they'll give out, I think $1,000, sort of Andrew Yang style. Trump and his crew talked today about doing that. So I think that's very interesting.
And it's $850 billion, I think.
That's what it would cost?
I think, well, it was, they're discussing $850 billion stimulus package for regular people.
Yeah. And so I think they're going to have to do something like this. Otherwise, too many people are going to dip into the poverty cycle. And once you sort of— once you get on that track, it's just very hard to get out. It's like being on the wrong end of a game of tetherball, and the other person is just hitting it just out of your reach, and it's just getting tighter and tighter. So I think they're going to need to do that.
