The government needs to step in and save American businesses or the US is going to spiral into a second Great Depression

• We have now entered the post-PPP Payroll Lay Off Phase (PLOP) of the COVID-19 Pandemic Recession of 2020 in the United States.
• Efforts by the federal government to soften the blow to businesses and households were bold – but we can see clearly now, not sufficient.
• America is still hemorrhaging jobs – many of them more than once.
• The thing that stands between the present severe, sharp recession, and a second Great Depression, is doing everything possible to ensure that when the virus is tamed (and it is a when, not an if), employers will still be around to pay their workers.
• Daniel Alpert is an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School.
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Since the "surprise" jobs report for May was released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on June 5th, I have been warning that the purported increases in the number of private sector jobs and the decline in unemployment that was reflected in that report – and again in the Employment Situation Report for the month of June, released earlier this month – have been chimeras.

Workers were not being "re-employed" en masse – in the conventional sense that they were getting back to the business of actually working – but were rather being "re-payrolled" by the tens of millions by dint of Payroll Protection Program (PPP) funds that were showered on nearly 4.9 million businesses with over 51 million jobs. In other words, businesses that offered 40% of all private sector jobs prior to the pandemic-related economic shutdown. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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See Also:

• Deciding how to reopen based on political bias and guesswork has been a disaster. Here's how we should do it instead.
• We need to stop talking about 'life after the pandemic.' It's a distraction from our current fight to contain the virus.
• Trump's renewed effort to dismantle Obamacare is particularly cruel during the pandemic

SEE ALSO: Trump needs to find a better nickname for Biden, and fast.

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