If someone were to wave a magic wand today and reopen the entire American economy, from sea to shining sea, I’m not convinced that we would be okay. The amount of damage that has been done so far is so incredible that it’s hard to take it all in.
And even if we reopened everything, there are many industries that will still fail entirely without bailouts because no one will want to use those services for years to come (crowded movie theaters, passenger jets, etc.). On top of that, many Democrat governors are making it fiscally impossible for some industries to ever reopen.
Governor Blackface McKlanhood of Virginia, for example, has ordered his state’s economy locked down until at least June 15th. That’s two months from now.
Not that he’s suffering from it. Governor McKlanhood (aka Ralph Northam) has signed an unimaginable progressive laundry list into law during the shutdown. Everything from banning gun sales to expansions of taxpayer funded abortions, ballot harvesting, voter fraud, you name it. When Virginia emerges on the other side of its arbitrary and unnecessarily long shutdown, it will be permanently blue.
The Governor of California, Nancy Pelosi’s Nephew, has announced the conditions that counties will have to meet in order to reopen. Businesses like restaurants will only be allowed to have half as many tables. That will make it “safe” for them to reopen.
What Governor Gavin Newsom doesn’t realize is that sit-down restaurants need X number of tables to be able to turn a minimum profit. If you cut X in half, the restaurant quickly goes broke. Restaurants would have to more than double their prices, and have customers willing to pay those prices, to stay in business. Will cash-strapped people emerging from their own shutdown be willing to shell out $40 for a piece of chicken?
You’d think Nancy Pelosi’s Nephew would take a wiser approach to this, especially since Hollywood is in his state. When the movie “Avengers: End Game” opened in April of last year, it earned a staggering amount of money at movie theaters: $2,800,000,000. The last weekend that movie theaters were open in America this year, March 13 to 15, the total North American box office take was $3,920. Even with masks and reduced seating, will anyone be willing to go sit in a movie theater with a bunch of strangers anytime soon?
I realize that a lot of conservatives are happy about this forced demise of Hollywood, but think about the ripple effects of the shutdown: Who will be buying the 200,000 acres of popcorn that farmers plant every year, to make up for their losses due to movie theaters being crushed? Once the price of corn collapses, farmers will start plowing their crops under instead of selling them, because the sales prices is too low to turn a profit for producing it. It’s all fun and games until the food shortages begin, right?
The airlines are doomed. I’ve never taken a commercial flight in my lifetime in which I didn’t get sick as a result. Every time in my life when I’ve flown, I catch a bug from someone thanks to the recirculated air. How many Americans will be hesitant to get on a flight once again, even with N-95 masks available for every passenger? Probably a lot of us.
Looking at the news feeds just today, JC Penney has filed for bankruptcy. All that it sells has been declared “nonessential” by the government. That’s another 95,000 employees who will be filing for unemployment tomorrow. Internet provider Frontier filed for bankruptcy today as well. Ford is teetering on the brink. But again, even if the economy was fully opened today, who will be rushing out to buy a new Ford Ranger with so much uncertainty in the economy?
One other thing went broke recently as well: The Paycheck Protection Program. The $350 billion fund that Congress set aside to help small businesses with payroll ran out of money today. As The Federalist noted last week, the geniuses who created the program funded small businesses to the tune of 2.5 times their monthly payroll. But mathematically, it would have needed 3.5 times’ worth of payroll to actually cover the length of the shutdown.
Quarantining the healthy to protect the vulnerable and the sick has turned out to be one of the most catastrophic decisions in history.
