Economic casualties

Erudite Partner is still teaching during this strange season of "sheltering in place." She's all too aware that the class she holds twice a week on Zoom consists of some of the people who are likely to be badly injured by the pandemic. That's not because they are at particular danger of getting ill; they are young and all securely housed. But they are college seniors, graduating into this horribly disrupted economy.

According to a study described in the Seattle Times, young people in that state, which is a bit ahead of the national curve, are already in big trouble.

The data show that a staggering 51% of young adults say they expect to need help paying the rent or mortgage in the next few months, compared with just 8% of seniors. And 53% of those 18 to 29 say they’ll need help paying for basic needs like food, medicine and utilities. Among those 65 and older, 16% say they will need help with this.

The survey also shows that those with a household income of less than $50,000 — a group which, naturally, includes a lot of young adults — are the most likely to need assistance.

And a greater share of people of color expect to need help compared with white Washingtonians, although the difference is not as dramatic as between young adults and seniors. Among white people, 29% said they would need help with rent or mortgage payments, compared with 37% of people of color. And 34% of white people said they would need assistance paying for basic needs compared with 39% of people of color.

There's no reason to expect the national picture of who is most immediately being hurt to be very different -- except that West Coast carnage in Black and Latinx communities seems generally a little less severe than what is happening around New York, and other older cities in the North like Chicago and Milwaukee. And there is also a terrible COVID cluster on Navajo lands. The COVID epidemic in the South is still under-reported, but if Louisiana offers any clue, as many as 70 percent of the victims may be Black.

We have recently seen what happens to an age cohort which comes of working age in times of economic trauma. People who graduated into the 2008 recession were slow to get good jobs, slow to be able to afford homes, slow to marry, and slow to become parents. They were still hurting when COVID knocked down their prospects again.

(I'm realizing that I'm a product an earlier round of this: my parents entered adulthood just as the Great Depression was taking hold and didn't see fit to have a child -- me -- until they had been married 15 years.)

But the new group are graduating into something much worse. And, because that's how the U.S. population shakes out, more of them will be coming from those disproportionately affected communities of color. Losing your mom to a virus doesn't help you launch.

Trump can bloviate all he likes about "opening up" the economy, but a nation terrified of gasping out its last breaths in an over-crowded ICU isn't going to throng to sports events and restaurants any time soon -- even if people could afford it. We've all got a world of hurt here.