by Robert Romano
25.4 million Americans have lost their jobs since February through mid-April, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports — 17.3 million who are unemployed, and another 8.1 million who have left the labor force completely — in response to the Chinese coronavirus pandemic as Americans sit home and wait it out.
Although the Bureau tabulates a reported unemployment rate of 14.7 percent, if you count the 8.1 million who left the labor force, too, plus the 5.8 million who were already unemployed, and the number looks more like 18.9 percent.
Either way, that is the highest reported unemployment rate since the Great Depression, and still moving north. As the monthly report was taken in mid-April, it does not take into account all of the initial jobless claims that have taken place since April 11, which total more than 11.4 million.
With so many millions of Americans losing their jobs every week, the data will continue to have a lot of noise as the two sets of numbers bleed into one another until they stop rising, and labor markets finally hit their bottom. Then the totality of the job losses will be known.
Suffice to say, wherever the true numbers are, they are bad enough. And they would probably be much higher if not for $730 billion plus that was given to small businesses via the payroll protection plan that was enacted by Congress.
But we are seeing real devastation with these state government directed closures, and it’s anyone’s guess how long it will be before we hit the bottom and then how long before we ever recover from the equivalent of an asteroid striking the global economy.
Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning was emphatic in his statement this morning that now it is time to reopen America: “Almost 8.1 million people have left the workforce since February, another 17.3 million people have become unemployed in the same time period, totaling 25.4 million who had jobs but no longer do. This is what it looks like when you shoot your economy in the head over a public health issue, and this is why reopening America is job one for our political leaders.”
Manning added, concluding, “Additional bailouts for states, local governments, business and others do not replace the jobs that a free market economy creates. Further delays in reopening state and local economies will only make the economic disaster worse. And more intractable. America can no longer allow this China originated virus to destroy our economic and societal future. It’s time to get back to work and stop pretending that massive government bailouts can solve the problem.”
That’s right. For as much money as Congress and the Federal Reserve throw at the problem, it will not solve it. For our modern society to function, we need a modern economy and that requires people to work. To all those who still harbor illusions what a Green New Deal or universal income schemes would do to the economy, this is what it would do. It would destroy our economy and remove incentives to work and prosper, and in the process we will no longer be a prosperous society.
We need to reopen the economy, while there still is an economy.
Robert Romano is the Vice President of Public Policy at Americans for Limited Government.
I know I’m no economist, so I don’t understand what all goes into this amorphous “The Economy”. I do know that people need to be able to work, if only for that sake, alone. We need individuals having the ability to provide for their families. Not only doe wee need to “make money” but we need to be able to spend it, too. We need cash to flow from consumer to producer to supplier and back and forth.
Personal economics gets trashed all the time from a dependence on credit, as “the borrower is slave to the lender.” We don’t need a “Universal Basic Income”, as that enslaves the ones working for an income better than “basic”.
We need to allow people the opportunity to use their unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. We have a right to life, not necessarily an easy life. We have a right to Liberty, better known as a choice. We have a right to pursue happiness, to use our choice to try to make our lives better. Our leaders need to step out of the way of the expression of those rights, and let us boldly rebuild what was destroyed in fear.
Our economy was already in bad shape well before the coronavirus lockdown. We can trace the blame back over forty years with the tail-end of the Carter Administration and, especially beginning with the Reagan Administration with his so-called supply-side voodoonomics and his advice to consumers to max out on their credit cards by falsely telling them that their bills would never come due. So much for the earlier conservative trop about tightening one’s belt. That idea went out with Reagan during 1981 and with nary a bleet of protest by other right-wingers! Blame the successors of both parties after Reagan’s Administration for blindly following in Reagan’s footsteps instead of making any effort to stop his regressive policies. With a top-heavy economy that more and more favors the very rich over the rest of us and with an economy that callously endangers our environmental safety, our economy was already on a collision course before March 22nd. The coronavirus merely finished the job.
To revive our economy, we will have to favor small businesses over big ones, have a real safety net, make working conditions safe for our essential employees, cut our reliance on fossil fuels and private single-occupancy automobiles in favor of mass transit. The list goes on.
No, the lock-down did not shoot down the economy: the Mitch McConnels and Nancy Pelosi’s did that for us.