A simple form of debt financing like, the United States Savings bond program signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR), February 1, 1935 could really help small cities raise the necessary revenue. The downturn in tourism will severely hit my "Village by the Sea." But if Langley could sell savings bonds, at say a price of $100 a bond; it would only have to sell 4,000 to recover $400,000 in lost tourism revenue. That target is achievable. Seahawk Russell Wilson could finance this by himself. But, this would require new legislation to make it possible.
Enabling municipalities to issue some kind of COVID bond to maintain staff and operations for 24 months could stave off unemployment. The federal CARES Act, enacted on March 27th, empowers small businesses to stave off unemployment by borrowing from the federal government. But even though the program is in place it needs to be fully funded.
Divine Justice
True Justice has a healing effect. In his 1936 re-nomination acceptance speech FDR said:
Liberty requires opportunity to make a living--a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for....If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place....Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference....
Heal the trauma: Fully pay all displaced workers.
[i] Kenneth S. Rogoff, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy and professor of economics in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, is a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and an author of an influential history of global financial crises, "This Time Is Different" (2009), with Kennedy School economist Carmen M. Reinhart.
[ii] Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, HarperCollins, N.Y. (1980) p. 386-387.
[iii] See note 1.
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