Economic Woes & Payday Loans Impacted by COVID-19

What Does that Mean?

$1200 shouldn't be able to fundamentally shift the patterns of entire economic tier. But here it the evidence that it did. We have got to do something about this. There is no reason that people in one of the most productive (GDP) and richest countries in the world are living paycheck-to-paycheck and in many cases barely scraping by with that.

Last point that is also extremely unnerving to me - the search volume for "payday loan" and associated terms did not spike up before the stimulus payment went out. Before someone screams at me correlation does not equal causation let me make my point... It looks like a lot of the people that search for "payday loans" weren't yet suffering unusual economic impact from COVID-19. Many in the segment of our population where $1200 changed their borrowing pattern may also fall into the category of "essential workers" hence they kept working and also had the extra funds to change their patterns.

The Bigger Picture

The federal minimum wage is $7.25. Someone working full time at the minimum wage for full years makes $15,080 before taxes. That $1200 stimulus was more than minimum wage workers' post-tax take home per month.

For a country with average GDP higher than 20 trillion per fiscal quarter with annual growth of 1-3.8%... For some perspective - if every single person in the US workforce, all 164,600,00 of us - split the quarterly GDP equally, we'd earn $120,000 or so before taxes each quarter. That's not how this works though.

But somehow $1200 is enough to radically change the lives of many among us.

This is so terribly sad.

The data