On The Mark: Workforce takes a hit from lingering pandemic

It’s been a tough year for most of us. We lost many people, especially among our elderly populations. Many workers lost their jobs. Others had to show up, especially those in our health care centers, at considerable personal risk. Many businesses closed, laid off workers, and/or weathered a collapse in sales and earnings.

As the ranks of laid-off workers expanded, many others chose to leave work to take care of preschoolers, school-aged kids or sick family members. Many of us have had to dip into savings, defer vacations, and/or face higher medical expenses. Most of us know someone we care about who died prematurely.

Our local, state and federal governments have pitched in creatively to help us out. Early on, economists advised leaders of a potentially deep economic recession nationally, as employers and workers alike took big income hits. In an early response, the feds paid out two rounds of stimulus checks to individuals earning less than $75,000 annually or married couples earning less than $150,000 — $1200 per person in 2020, $1400 per person in 2021. As Covid spread and the economic dislocation deepened, this 2021 American Rescue Plan also funded child tax credits, vaccine distribution funding, and an extension of expanded unemployment benefits.

These funding streams worked their way into our communities, enabling people to pay medical expenses, buy food, gas, and other necessities, and cover rent and mortgage payments and utility bills. For economy watchers like me, there were lots of fascinating twists and turns. Longer-term interest rates sank to levels not seen for decades, sparking interest in home buying. The stock market boomed, a phenomenon I can’t explain, since so many businesses took deep hits. There just must be so many rich people who can afford to participate in the Wall Street casino, regardless of Covid displacements. Those gains seem ill-gotten.

Many retail businesses shut down completely. Restaurants and cafes, in particular, took big hits because their face-to-face work and service environments were potential Covid breeding grounds. Live entertainment venues that present in close quarters — from Broadway to opera, symphony and music clubs, including our local Encore Performing Arts Center — closed for many months. It’s amazing that essential retail services, from grocery stores to medical clinics, stayed open. The willingness of employees and customers to practice masking and social distancing has been a gift to all of us.

Our state and federal governments continue to innovate in ways that address the displacing effects of Covid and required social distancing. The Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development has launched its new $70 million grant program for small businesses.

Congress is poised on an investment bill: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which, if passed by both the House (clearly yes) and Senate (unclear) will infuse billions into new federal-aid highway, transit, and safety programs.

All of this remarkable activity, much of it experiments in remediation, reminds this economist of the striking prosperity that the Roosevelt-Truman era investments in infrastructure brought to a nation suffering from the prolonged 1930s Great Depression. These, as well as World War II’s mobilization of every adult American capable of working for the war effort, brought an end to the Depression era. They also ushered in a long period of prosperity, not just for Americans but also for our European allies, whom we helped recover through the 1948 Marshall Plan, providing more than $15 billion to finance rebuilding on the continent.

Columnist Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. She lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell.