05-28-2020, 10:35 AM
The unemployment rate in the U.S. is now at its highest level since the Great Depression. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 25% by this point.
And there is no end in sight for any of this. Nothing can return to normal while the virus still spreads, and it isn't going to stop until we have a vaccine, which is 6 months or a year or two away (or possibly even never). By the time the virus is behind us and we can try to return to normal, we're going to find that we can't.
It's easy to drop a glass on the floor and shatter it, and vastly more difficult to somehow put all the pieces back together. Once you have enough people out of work, and enough people who've lost confidence in the economy and who have stopped spending and are saving everything, how do you reverse this? People aren't spending, businesses aren't hiring because they don't have the sales to support new hires, large numbers of people are out of work and have no jobs they could possibly get. With so many people not working and not producing anything, society is much poorer than it was.
The government, which is tasked with fixing all this, is much poorer than it was, as its tax revenue is considerably lower than it once was. It doesn't have the money to just hire 25% of the population and pay them all to do who knows what.
The last Great Depression didn't end until World War II. When will this one end?
And there is no end in sight for any of this. Nothing can return to normal while the virus still spreads, and it isn't going to stop until we have a vaccine, which is 6 months or a year or two away (or possibly even never). By the time the virus is behind us and we can try to return to normal, we're going to find that we can't.
It's easy to drop a glass on the floor and shatter it, and vastly more difficult to somehow put all the pieces back together. Once you have enough people out of work, and enough people who've lost confidence in the economy and who have stopped spending and are saving everything, how do you reverse this? People aren't spending, businesses aren't hiring because they don't have the sales to support new hires, large numbers of people are out of work and have no jobs they could possibly get. With so many people not working and not producing anything, society is much poorer than it was.
The government, which is tasked with fixing all this, is much poorer than it was, as its tax revenue is considerably lower than it once was. It doesn't have the money to just hire 25% of the population and pay them all to do who knows what.
The last Great Depression didn't end until World War II. When will this one end?