This is literally the stupidest thing any President has done in my lifetime since Clinton sold our factories to China. Sending people back to work because "muh stonks" is guaranteed to kill 3 million people at least from Coronavirus plus millions more from other causes because the hospitals will be overrun.
And this is ME saying this. I've been a Trump superfan from day 1. I've wanted Trump to be President since 1999. But seriously, Trump needs to stop listening to LOLbertarian "influencers" and listen to actual doctors when dealing with this pandemic.
Come on, we can shut everything down for 40 days to get the disease under control, give the people the $1200 so they can survive the 40 days, and then when this is fixed open the businesses again, hire the people back, and the Fed can inject liquidity into the market like it's been doing and artificially raise the stock value back to 29,000 again in a couple months.
With case fatality what it is, if we do nothing and 60 million people get infected (a low estimate) that means 3 million deaths just from Covid-19. That's not including other deaths from easily preventable causes that could have been avoided had the hospitals not been overwhelmed. If we do nothing and go back to business as usual then every heart attack and stroke, and major car accidents will be a death sentence because all medical personnel will be treating Covid-19 patients. Is the economic damage of keeping everyone at home for 40 days worth the cost of permanently removing 3 million+ people from the workforce? Employees who are laid off can be rehired, dead people can't be brought back.
The number of infected is doubling every 3 days in the US. That means if we all go back to work and pretend "It's just the flu" that there will be 81 million people infected in 33 days. We've already seen the number of cases world-wide double in the past 7 days from 200,000 to now 422,000, and at this rate it will be close to 1 million by the end of the month, just 7 days away. And the rate of new infections is increasing even faster in the US (spreading twice as fast as it did in China, where the disease started). 20% develop serious complications. That's 16 million people out of work and in hospitals that are already operating at capacity because, apparently, the US economy, which is "The strongest it's ever been in history", is so fragile that it cannot be put on hold for 40 days.
I understand "It's just old people" (until the hospitals are overrun, then young people will start dying too as there aren't enough doctors or supplies to go around), and millionaires like Glenn Beck and the Texas governor who work from home anyway "Would rather die than kill the country," but isn't that just the height of hypocrisy coming from the same people who railed against the "death panels" in Obamacare? "We're pro-life, we value the lives of old people, it's immoral for the bean counters to decide who lives and dies." Was that argument always a partisan lie or was it always a partisan lie? It's the same BS as when the "anti-war" Democrats all of a sudden vanished the day Obama took office and he kept up the same Bush neo-lib policies of world policing "Because now our man is in the White House".
And I hated Bush, I hated Obama, I hate policing the world and socialized medicine that forces people to wait in line to get on the list to wait in line to see a doctor, and I voted for Trump as the first person running for President in my lifetime who I actually liked, but this is madness.
"They'll put me out of my home if I can't pay my mortgage/rent!"
Most places with lockdowns have made it explicitly clear that these are extraordinary circumstances and people will not be left homeless or have their utilities shut off, and in places where these basic protections are not in place for the average person then it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that no one is made homeless because of this disease.
"I'm not scared! I want to return to work because I've made shit financial decisions and Orange Drumpfler's check won't pay off all my debt/I'm bored!"
That's exactly the attitude that has turned the West to shit. The selfish, atomized individual who cares not for society, because it's not like I have to live in society, right? The West is precisely in this mess because people have abandoned God and have given up on their communities. They've traded social ties for cheap Chinese garbage at Walmart (who knew the apocalypse would be made in China?), and real human interactions for Netflix, and that's why divorce rates, drug use, suicide, obesity, heart disease, alcoholism, rates of STDs, homelessness, single mothers on welfare who vote for out of control big government because the state has replaced husbands and fathers, and uncontrolled illegal immigration are through the roof and the middle class has vanished. People are too selfish to sit at home for 40 days and don't care if anyone else dies, because it's some other poor fool dying, not them.
Right now we have a chance to get the disease under control. We can shelter in place for long enough to start mass-producing masks, Chloroquine tablets, test kits, and other PPE and accoutrements necessary to treat people, and make sure that the majority of the people who are currently sick are cured. This should be about 40-60 days provided the measures we take aren't half-assed. After that we can start letting people get back to work, beginning with the people who have already survived the disease and have antibodies built up (who can theoretically go back as soon as possible and don't even need to wait the full duration of the quarantine). After that the economy should recover a good 70-80% before the election in November and Trump will win in a massive landslide having survived impeachment and being hailed as an untouchable hero who beat the Coronavirus.
If we don't treat this with the seriousness that it deserves and try to "get back to work" to keep the economy, I mean "country" from dying, because the US economy is apparently a house of cards that can't be put on hold for 40 days, we run the risk of turning every city into New York, with tens of thousands of cases and hospitals overflowing. The second wave of the disease, produced by our own hubris, will be much worse than the first, and we'll have to wait for it to burn through the population and kill millions. The cost of half-assing, or even quarter-assing this is the risk of turning a recession into a major depression from which the US may never recover.
So yes, if you are really pro-life and opposed to death panels, and even if you do value your stonks, the safer bet is to wait this out for just a little while rather than pretending it is just a nothing burger that's no worse than the flu and that it's okay for grandma and grandpa to die because they're just Social Security useless eaters anyway as long as the economy looks good on paper.
#NotDying4WallStreet
