We’re killing our own economy, driving millions out of work and are about to spend two trillion dollars trying to restart what we ground to a halt — all over a faulty doomsday model.
For a couple weeks now, Jesse Kelly has been raising the alarm about the catastrophic fallout from the US shutting down its economy over the Wuhan virus. His Twitter timeline has been a non-stop stream of warnings over the sheer number of unemployment claims we were about to have.
And it turns out, Jesse was right.
Today we learned that 3.28 million unemployment claims were made last week. That is the single highest number of weekly unemployment claims ever.
We’re killing our own economy, driving millions out of work and are about to spend two trillion dollars trying to restart what we ground to a halt — all over a faulty doomsday model.
The collateral damage of this blunder we are only now beginning to see.
And it will get worse the longer this goes on.
Those 3.28 million unemployment claims are just from last week. We’ll get another round just as bad this week. And the week after that. And the week after that – for as long as this economy is shut down.
You don’t help improve the health and safety of the people by driving them out of their jobs and grounding our economy into the dust.
It isn’t as if you can simply PAUSE our economy for weeks then press PLAY and expect everything to instantly go back where it was before this started. It doesn’t work that way. Businesses still have expenses even during a shutdown. And eventually, with no new revenue coming in, they’re going to run out of capital to meet those expenses.
In other words, a lot of these businesses who are shuttered now won’t be coming back. And the people who worked there will be screwed.
Last week’s unemployment claims are just the beginning of this nightmare.
Take a look at Jesse Kelly’s Twitter timeline. Yesterday he asked folks to share their stories and he then retweeted them to his followers. Yes, it makes for grim reading, but these stories need to be seen.
We need to understand just how catastrophic this is because the news media isn’t going to tell us. They’ll be far too busy trying to hang these unemployment claims around President Trump’s neck to give a shit about real lives being destroyed.
Americans aren’t losing their jobs and their businesses because of a normal economic downturn. State and local governments are forcing them to close their doors because of a faulty models of supposed impending mass death.
This idea that the only option we have to stop the spread of this virus is to completely shut down our economy is absurd. It’s always been absurd.
And the fools who screech “You want to kill old people just to pad your 401Ks!!!!” are not serious people. Sadly for Americans, most of those people work in the news media.
Listen, it is absolutely within our abilities to lock down hot spots like New York City, quarantine and protect the vulnerable, maintain social distancing and hygiene while still opening our economy back up. It is not, nor has it ever been an “either/or” scenario.
Fact is, if we don’t get our economy moving again, we risk harming all the Americans whose lives are currently not at risk from the Wuhan virus. All because some idiot in the UK got everyone panicking into thinking the virus would kill two million Americans.
If we continue to see unemployment claims as horrifying as last week, we will drive this country into a Depression.
And driving us into a Depression in order to stop a virus is a cure that is far, far worse than the disease.
Because this disease isn’t as bad as they predicted.
It’s going to get worse you guys. If we do not let businesses reopen and let Americans get back to work, it is going to get much, much worse.