Yeah this POV leans heavily on the fan fiction of a pre-assumed 1B in value that we could have signed just in the nick of time before the world lost its mind and we'd be riding high. Heck, we could have even used the gov welfare to pay out at those higher rates too! Win-win! Any concessions it would have taken to get that raise would be minor. That's the fantasy world of retroactive, non-falsifiable hypotheticals that we're supposed to automatically assume were presented to us on a silver platter.