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Originally posted by Brad Thomson
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I really don't think many people get what is going on in America. The most-free democracy in the world is also the country worst hit by coronavirus. Is anyone connecting the dots? Americans cherish their freedom and will bring out guns to protect it, but that very freedom is causing them to do the things that shouldn't be done in a pandemic: social gatherings. not wearing masks, reopening too soon. China, on the other hand, has brought the virus under control, amazing considering the much higher density of their population.
In a pandemic-free world, capitalism with all of its faults beats communism with all of its faults. But in a world of pandemic, it appears the two systems switch places, because freedom is exactly what is NOT required during a pandemic, and the insistence on individual and corporate freedoms seems to dramatically worsen the effects of the pandemic.
Right now we are in a buffer zone, where things are bad, but not ridiculously bad, because the government is printing money. But there is something knows as the "cobra effedt'. It goes like this: there is an epidemic of cobras, and a government-sponsored bounty is placed on dead cobras. At first it works, that is where we are now. The government is paying extra benefits to the epidemic of unemployed workers.
But as time goes on, people breed and then kill cobras to cash in. Once the government realizes this, they cancel the bounty. The breeders then release their inventories or cobras into the wild, and now there are more cobras than ever. That is where we are headed: the government will soon claim that payments to unemployed workers keep them from even looking for work and will stop paying them extra unemployment benefits. All those unemployed workers then stop paying rent and going out to restaurants, and the economy slides much deeper into recession / depression than it would have if the government had never paid out extra benefits in the first place.
This winter will be the worst in living memory in the USA. States and municipalities are going to go broke, laying off hundreds of thousands of workers, stopping almost all services. The car industry will collapse, just as it should have back in 2009. The housing market will collapse. Homelessness will explode in all major cities, more protests and riots will then happen.
Whether or not Trump cancels the 2020 election and remains in office after January, there is really nothing he or Biden will be able to do to stop this. One last surge of government spending will likely happen, But the snowball effect will be too far advanced by then. And if by chance there is a second wave of the virus, it is game over for America. That is when some kind of war, with Iran or China, will become very likely.
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