Stupidity and the coronavirus outbreak ...

Along with the coronavirus outbreak, we’re seeing an outbreak of stupidity. 

Large segments our population – specifically the young – are simply refusing to respect the requests to avoid gathering in groups. 

I am not surprised one bit.  What did anyone expect from them after being coddled and told how special they are all their pampered lives? Suddenly they’d care about the health and wellbeing of others? Seriously? When you’ve been told all your life you’re so special that the rules don’t apply to you, nobody should be surprised at their behavior.

They know they aren’t at the highest risk of dying from the virus; older people are, and they don’t care what happens to older people, even older family members.  They only care about themselves.  They’re selfish, self-centered little twits whose every whims have been indulged by their parents, their teachers and everyone else.    

Now they are going to repay all that special attention by getting infected and then spreading it to their older and more vulnerable bosses, parents, and grandparents.  Thanks, kids.     

We’re also learning how screwed up we’ve allowed things to become.  More importantly, how completely brain-dead our political class is. 

Here’s a bit of gratuitous advice to our political leaders: We can’t bribe our way out of this economic collapse. It didn’t work in the financial collapse in 2008 and won’t work now. Sometimes you just have to let things bottom out before they can recover. This is one of those times. 

The only way to solve the current economic problem is to stop the virus and get people back to work.  Everything else is bullshit. That means if it takes shutting everything down and quarantining people against their will to get people to stop spreading the virus, so be it. 

Sending checks to people in the meantime is, then, bullshit.

This will not bring the economy back. It will only make things worse.  If the poohbahs in DC thought about it for a moment, they’d understand that sending people money for not working is something we already do – it’s called unemployment comp; that mechanism already is in place and it should be used this time around, too.  We can always add more money to the unemployment comp system but we shouldn’t ignore it as the best answer to unemployment. 

If the goal is to keep people afloat until they have work again that’s the answer. It always has been. The only freaking answer that makes sense.  We don’t need a new safety net program, we already have enough of those already and they don’t need to be expanded. 

People on Social Security will still get their checks, so will those on disability. SNAP benefits and other food assistance programs are already in place.  There’s no need to expand these.   

But of course, we all know that’s not what the checks-in-the-mail plan is really all about.  It’s about giving those who already don’t work or could but won’t work a check, too. This includes bogus dependents “families” in urban areas routinely claim, illegal immigrants, and all the other weasels and slackers sucking off and defrauding the system already.

Essentially, the Democrat base. Surprised?   

So here’s a logic question for the geniuses in DC who want to pound money into the economy to quick-start a recovery: If stores, restaurants, and entertainment places are all closed, where would anyone spend the extra money you want to send them?

Oh, they’d use it to pay their rent and other bills, they say.

Like what other bills? We’re talking about a month at worst.  And I will never believe that crap that 40% or Americans couldn’t come up with $400 for an emergency – that’s absolute, unmitigated bullshit; some perhaps, but 40%? Almost half of Americans? 

Or that the parents of between 20-30 million school children can’t afford to feed their own kids; that’s supposedly why we have to feed them meals at school. And with public schools shut down, we need to find a way to continue to provide meals to those kids – they are depending on this free food to survive, despite the SNAP benefits we already provide to their parents for the same purpose. Seriously, how did we ever allow this to happen?

It's all bullshit.   

I feel the same about increasing childcare assistance for people without jobs – why?  So they don’t have to care for their children while they don’t have a job? And are at home already?  

Equally stupid are bailouts for the airlines, cruise lines, hotel industry and probably soon theme parks, Broadway, dinner theaters, food trucks, and hot-dog vendors, the way it’s going. With talk of as much as a trillion bucks on the table, every business is going to have its hand out; every business will claim that without help they’ll go bankrupt and thousands will lose their jobs. 

Guess what, corporate weasels, most of those thousands of jobs have already been furloughed or cut by you. You’ve already lost that bargaining chip. 

As far as bankruptcy, so what? If your company is destined to survive it will, probably in better financial shape than before. If it doesn’t survive bankruptcy someone else will surely take its place, buy its assets, move on and most likely hire a lot of its former employees. 

And for those running small businesses, as I once did, sorry guys, shit happens. That’s why there’s business-interruption insurance. That’s why you need to keep a reserve, too.

If your business is running on fumes month to month barely making payroll while piling up ever more debt year after year now’s not the time to blame everything on the coronavirus outbreak. Uncle Sam can't save you. It may sound cruel, but some businesses are destined to fail. Many will during this outbreak because, as I said, shit happens.  We need to let that occur. 

Overall, we need to stop focusing so much on what Wall Street does, or what investors like, and concentrate on stopping this virus no matter what it takes.  The rest will take care of itself. 

We don’t need to spend trillions in stimulus in the meantime. It’s just money down a rathole.  As it was before in the 2008 financial crisis.