It’s now clear that the disastrous consequences of America’s economic shutdown will be far worse than the original reason for the shutdown. The misery from the extended lockdowns is spreading further every day, and as people are going broke, basic items on the grocery store shelves are going through rapid inflation.
President Trump was correct in his original assessment that the US should shut down no later than Easter Sunday. We have many good reasons to lift the shutdowns right now.
First, the purpose of the shutdowns was to brace our health care system for impact. We’ve accomplished this. Even our PPE supply, which was drastically diminished by the Obama administration and never restocked after the 2009 pandemic, is starting to be resupplied. We set up field hospitals, docked Navy hospital ships in the ports of two of our largest cities, and discovered some effective treatment methods using already-existing malaria drugs to save lives. We have more ICU units, more available beds, more ventilators, more everything. We’re ready. We’re braced.
We didn’t just “flatten the curve.” We snapped the fake hockey stick graph off, and we are over the hump. The expected death toll projection today (60,000) is only .014% of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s initial prediction. Hey, he was only off by 99.9%!
If we get a second wave of the virus later this year, we won’t be any better prepared to deal with it than we are right now. In fact, we’ll be worse off if we continue to throw more and more people out of work. You need to have money flowing through the economic system in order for a nation to function. How exactly can we help ourselves or other nations if we go broke by hiding in our homes?
Second, the kids are safe. During any emergency situation, the first priority of any parent or grandparent is to keep their children safe. No child has died from COVID-19. Every single news report about a child dying from this disease has turned out to be false. In every case, they were infected with the virus, which was discovered after the child died from something else. COVID-19 hasn’t even been a contributing factor to any of the deaths of children. We have had 105 children die from seasonal flu in the US this winter. The number from COVID-19 is zero.
If the children are safe, there is no reason to keep the economy locked down. Which is worse: Putting children at risk of catching a virus that they’re basically immune from, or putting millions of children’s families on food stamps by protecting them?
I’m not suggesting that schools should be reopened. Keep them shut down! This homeschooling experiment will do wonders for America’s educational standards for years to come. School bureaucrats will be amazed at how high kids are scoring on standardized tests all of a sudden and will hope that we all forget about this time when kids were learning at home with their parents and the internet.
Third, the misery of throwing so many millions out of work is becoming unimaginable. The news networks are focused almost entirely on what’s happening in Washington, DC, while ignoring the real story happening in the rest of America. The line of cars for a free food giveaway in Van Nuys, California was more than a mile last week. We have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million people who have now filed for unemployment. That’s almost the entire population of the state of Florida, the third most populated state in the country. If the shutdown lasts another week, the number of unemployed is likely to exceed the population of Texas (25 million).
What the news morons don’t understand is that even if we flipped a switch and reopened the entire economy tomorrow (which won’t happen), many of those people won’t have jobs to go back to. The small businesses that employed them have already gone under.
Even the small business rescue plan that provided 2.5 months’ worth of payroll to small businesses, won’t be enough to save many small businesses. According to a report in The Federalist last week, the feds forgot to account for the month that had just passed, in which small businesses had already missed payroll (the shutdowns began in the middle of a month). The rescue package would have had to cover 3.5 months’ worth of payroll to have saved many small businesses.
We cannot start to undo the damage from the shutdowns until we start to reopen things. Remaining shut down from this point on is only going to make things worse. We flattened the curve and now we’re headed straight for the cliff.
