Starting now

      The headline of my local paper of record, the Plattsburgh Press-Republican, reported my county was furloughing up to 150 workers.   Assuming revenue picks up later in the summer, the county supervisor said all 150 would be back on  the payroll.  The next county over was contemplating straight layoffs with no plans to rehire.   This scenario will play out all across New York and the rest of the US as the pandemic depresses economic activity and the revenue it generates to fund state and local governments.
      Meanwhile, in Washington, deficit vultures such as Moscow Mitch McConnell are gathering around stricken state governments and plotting to use this crisis as a means of reducing government spending on pandemic relief.   The vulture term is courtesy of Paul Krugman of the NYT who uses that term as well as "deficit Peacock" to illustrate how broken the republican party has become.  Instead of using government to ease the pain of the Covid 19 crisis, the vultures will use it to increase that pain, while the peacocks justify the suffering as necessary in the face of multi trillion dollar deficits.
     As Krugman points out, the government can now borrow at negative interest rates and while the figures look daunting, most economists agree we are not burdening future generations with debt, because we will never pay off that debt.   As Krugman has pointed out in the past, the US government is not like the average family that must live on a budget.  As a sovereign nation, we can issue debt to pay for pandemic relief or in the case of republicans, a 1.7 trillion dollar tax cut last year.   The only time republicans seem to worry about debt is when democrats occupy the White House.
    The federal government needs to deliver relief to state and local governments so they can keep their employees on the payroll.   If state and county employees are laid off, the recovery hill gets that much harder to climb and the economic pain will last longer than it has to.   The only thing we have to fear from deficits is fear of deficits.