When policymakers promulgate COVID-19 restrictions, they are asking the people with the least economic margin for error to sacrifice the most.
Just when it seemed some of the most disheartening trends in the U.S. economy were finally beginning to reverse, COVID-19 arrived to entrench them.
The pandemic has been a neutron bomb targeted at the prospects of lower-income working people. They had finally begun to benefit from the recovery from the Great Recession when the virus ravaged sectors of the economy that disproportionately employ them.
The Washington Post has called the resulting economic damage “the most unequal recession in modern U.S. history.” As the paper puts it, starkly, “the less workers earned at their job, the more likely they were to lose it.”
