OPINION: Examining economics during the pandemic

Covid-19+Molecule

“Coronavirus” by danielfoster437 is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Over the past year the pandemic has had a widespread effect on multiple people, businesses and especially our economy. While we have been in a decline in the economy with loss of jobs and prices of goods increasing, it has led to positives as well as negatives. The stock market is a perfect example.

In the past year and during the pandemic we have been able to see how resilient our economy is. With the major drop in the stock market as a whole, to the sharp spike in gas prices to our tariffs. Collin Hute, an Economics and Business teacher at Lincoln High said “I’ve obviously got retirement and my own personal funds tied up in the stock market, so I have paid close attention to the economy over the span of the pandemic over this past year.”

Many people have been affected and lost jobs. “I was fortunate enough to not lose my job and so I took advantage of the market,” Hute said. “This has been my most successful year financially that I have ever had. When I saw market tanking I saw that as an opportunity to buy in when it is cheap and now they have all risen.”

Trying to get a wider view of what people were thinking from the pandemic, I surveyed 61 high school students on how they thought the economy had been affected during the pandemic on a scale of 1-5. In the end, the most common answer was a 3 with 44.3% or 27 people choosing it. The least popular answer was a 5 with only one person answering it.

So with everything that has gone on the effect has been pretty bad but has led to good stuff as well, with the vaccines and the stimulus checks have led to the start of a rebound from the pandemic, with us starting to get back to some normalcy.