If You Lost Your Income, You Care A Lot More About the Economy than COVID-19

There has been much talk about how stay at home orders and social distancing has more support among progressives compared with conservatives. However, I haven't seen any analysis on whether an individual losing her income is more or less likely to support efforts to “flatten the curve.”

We did a survey of over 3,100 readers of studentloanplanner.com on Friday April 17, 2020. I cannot claim our readers are a representative sample of America as a whole. Our readers are more educated, more progressive politically, and younger than the population at large.

We asked these thousands of readers if they were claiming unemployment, if their income had changed, and what their views on reopening the country economically were.

Our findings suggest that voters on average reach an economic pain point where they support reopening the economy in spite of the risk of COVID-19.

Specifically, if you lost your income, you're 44% more likely to favor reopening the economy in less than 2 months compared to someone who has not experienced an income change. These views appear to hold even in professions with high risk of COVID-19 exposure.

How Fast Do Our Readers Think the Shutdown Should Last?

Overall, our readers are not the firebrand type. Only 4% said we should reopen the country immediately.

More than half of the respondents worked in a healthcare occupation.

“As long as it takes” was the most popular answer for how long the shut down should last. So there is substantial support for sacrificing economically to flatten the curve of COVID-19.

Even so, a majority supported reopening the country economically in less than two months.

How the Unemployed View Reopening the Country

When we performed the survey, the national unemployment rate hovered around 10%. A little under 10% of our readers reported that they were currently receiving unemployment benefits.

Where things get interesting is how the unemployed responded to the question of when to reopen the country economically.

Clearly, those receiving unemployment benefits are less likely to say that we should keep the country closed down economically for as long as it takes.

How Reopening Views Differ By Income Loss

We know that a lot of states such as Florida are not processing unemployment claims very quickly. Hence, the number of workers answering that they had lost their income would be greater than those who were receiving unemployment benefits.

We broke readers out into 3 categories:

• Lost income completely, i.e. you're earning $0 now (14% of readers)
• Significant fall in income, but you're still earning something (26% of readers)
• You're earning roughly the same amount as you were before COVID-19 (60% of readers)

These numbers reveal that borrowers who lost their income completely are even less inclined than those receiving unemployment to support keeping the economy closed indefinitely. 

Hence, receiving government assistance might have some affect on willingness to lose your income to reduce the number of COVID-19 cases, but the vast majority of the effect comes from losing your income or not. 

Note that the view of individuals who saw a decline in their income without losing everything fell in between those who had not seem an income loss and those who lost their income completely. 

If you sum the percentages of individuals who lost their income completely who want to reopen in less than 2 months, that totals to 62%. The same stat for those without an income change is 44%.

That makes voters who lost their income completely 44% more likely to support reopening in less than those who didn't lose income at all (62% minus 44% divided by 44%).

How Reopening Views Differ By Profession

Dentists have been devastated financially from the COVID-19 recession. Physicians have not seen income losses nearly as bad. 

Both face significant risks in working with COVID patients, and there isn't any obvious partisan difference between these two professions.

So how do views on reopening the economy change by profession? First let's look at how the incomes of various professionals have changed since the start of COVID-19.  

With this data in mind, let's see how some of the worst affected professions compare to some of the least affected financially on their views of reopening the economy. 

There's an extremely clear pattern that professionals that have been most severely impacted financially support reopening faster. 

This seems to be true independent of risk of exposure. For example, dentists have among the highest risks of all occupations of COVID-19 exposure according to the NY Times. 

This provides support to the theory that job loss is more important in determining opinion on reopening the country compared with someone's individual risk of exposure or their own role in risking public health by having their office open.

Yet dentists seem to want the economy to reopen MUCH faster than physicians. This is in large part due to the severe financial impact this profession has faced. 

Additionally, higher income professions like dentistry see less of their income replaced by enhanced unemployment benefits. 

Does Age or State of Residence Matter for Support of Economic Shutdown?

We analyzed the age and state of residency of our readers as well.

We found no correlation for age and opinion about reopening, which is interesting given that risk of COVID-19 increases with age.

We did find some relationship with bluer states supported flattening the curve and a slower reopening to the economy than red states, but there were mixed results.

For example, readers in Michigan favored reopening much faster than residents of Ohio, despite the outbreak being so much worse there.

Illinois favored reopening much faster than New York, despite the outbreak being worse in New York.

So there were trends but no clear results based on state of residence.

The Breaking Point for Economic Pain From COVID-19

Much has been made of statements like “the cure can't be worse than the problem.”

It seems like regardless of partisans effects, individuals who have faced a significant income loss favor much faster reopening of the economy than those who do not face an income loss.

This is true even with professions at high risk of COVID-19 exposure.

As job losses continue to pile up across multiple industries, these results suggest workers will become more and more inpatient to reopen the country.