People Start to Agree with Me: An Economic Shutdown Isn’t Sustainable

Apr 1, 2020

RUSH: I’ve got a couple of great things. You know, yesterday I was dancing around the topic, dancing around the eco-message. This is not sustainable. We can’t go on like this and now there are two pieces, two articles, two columns, two blog posts — actually, they’re longer than that — that actually touch on this, and I’m gonna be sharing with you today eagerly about this.

I mean, the timing is perfect. And even, you know, yesterday when I talked about California and why the curve in California’s hardly going up, they talked about it at the briefing yesterday. It came up. And they’re trying to credit social distancing being started early in California for the fact that there’s no massively great upward curve, new cases and deaths based on the whole population the state.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now to the economics again.

I spent a lot of time yesterday dancing around something, and it is this: We simply cannot — with no end in sight — go on like this. We cannot be in the midst of this economy being shut down with no end in sight. It’s not gonna work. Now, they can tell us, “Well, we think in two weeks we’ll be able to relax things,” and then those two weeks go by and they can’t. They’ll say, “Oh, give us another two weeks,” because they think that we can live with waiting an additional two weeks every two weeks.

If they tell us six months, that won’t work. But there’s an overriding problem with this, and it is the uncertainty combined with nobody talking about it. Right now all of the talk is about medical. All the talk is about the horrible medical statistics, predictions, models, all the talk is apocalyptic when we’re discussing the virus. It’s all apocalyptic. It’s all end of the world. It’s all end of this. It’s all death. It’s all new numbers, 2.2 million, 240,000.-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Rush is right.

The part of the show I heard today was very good.

The damage is done.... it is Trump’s legacy of total failure.... it overshadows everything that he’s done.....

We’re Following A One-Size-Fits-All Coronavirus Strategy Right Into A Great Depression
While this shutdown has already done enormous damage, it is the uncertainty about when and how it will reopen that could prove far more destructive in the long run.

By Ben Domenech, April 1, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/01/were-following-a-one-size-fits-all-coronavirus-strategy-right-into-a-great-depression/

Our leadership class responded to the outbreak of the coronavirus by shutting down the economy on a nationwide scale. While this will mitigate the loss of life the virus might otherwise have caused, it’s clear we’re also confronting a challenge no medical innovation can cure. We face an unprecedented situation — not a global pandemic, we’ve seen those before, but a modern capitalist economy that turned itself off for potentially more than 60 days, on purpose.

Uncertainty crushes hope. So the question on the minds of our leaders should be: how do we give citizens more confidence that we can, and will, turn the economy back on?

While this shutdown has already done enormous damage, it is the uncertainty about how it will reopen that could prove far more destructive in the long run. And the knee-jerk reaction from a jittery Congress in the form of multi-trillion-dollar bailouts could create a number of disincentives for many people to go back to work.

For all the scary headlines coming out of New York City, most of what we know at this moment regarding the coronavirus, as it relates to public health, is better than expected. We know that while highly infectious, our hospital systems seem to be responding better than initially thought. The shutdowns have been abided by, for the most part. Most Americans are doing a good job of distancing, behaving responsibly, and staying off the roads (with some exceptions).

Quote

---

so we're just going to be in quarantine forever huh pic.twitter.com/loykFYkNRD

— internet baby (@kirkpate) March 30, 2020

---

Thanks to that, deaths are lagging far behind the dire predictions of the expert and media class. At this pace, 2.2 million Americans are not going to die from this pandemic, the headline-grabbing figure advanced by the Imperial College UK, which assumed no changes in behavior or policy.

The White House projects 100,000 to 240,000 deaths, even with sustained social distancing. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Education, which projects around 82,000 deaths assuming social distancing lasts through May, looks far more realistic given current reporting. Let us hope even those predictions turn out to be on the high end.

In the meantime, what we do know for a fact is that 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, the biggest jump in history (beating a jump of 695,000 in 1982), a number that is only going to continue to grow. This is thanks to an unprecedented and purposeful shutdown of the economy on a national scale, and driven by those who insisted anything less than a national shutdown would be disastrous.

-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Quote: austingirl wrote in post #7

---

I changed my mind and wrote to Trump again.
President Trump,
You have been hoodwinked into destroying your greatest achievement - the economy- by power-mad, publicity-seeking Dr. Fauci. The original models have been proven wrong and the current projections will be too and you will be left with a demoralized, impoverished nation. The damage to the health of formerly healthy Americans will suffer greatly. I can no longer go to my gym where I used to swim three times a week. The small family-owned gym will probably shut its doors forever. I cannot access medical care. My dental and colonoscopy appointments have been cancelled. There are no Wuhan virus cases in my county and only one in the next county where my doctors are located. That person is not hospitalized but isolating at home. Quarantines are for sick people and those who have comorbidities, not strong healthy people who want to live their lives, go to work, and stay fit.
Why are you letting Fauci who ignored the novel virus H1N1 outbreak in 2009 (and the Spanish flu pandemic was an H1N1 virus) call the shots. There is no reason that people who do not have the virus cannot go about their business.

I was a strong supporter of yours, but no longer. You have taken away the God-given rights of citizens. People die every day for a variety of reasons. It is not the role of government to try to prevent this.

Your legacy will be a third-world America and there isn't enough money in existence to repair the economic damage your actions have already caused. I guess you'll just print more. I never thought I'd say it, but you are a fool.

---