Kill US to Save the Economy, Stupid!

     . . . . Georgia's governor is re-opening the beaches.

THEY are going to make all of Us shelter in place all summer because THEY won't. Recall this is a governor who was unaware there was a CDC down the road 5 miles away or that asymptomatic people can and do infect others.

And there are reasons he gives not a shyte.

From a French professor, with whom I exchange information, who, with his girlfriend, went through having the virus in Paris.

"Was working on this text (for my students) and realized it's actually quite informative... Could be posted in several threads really... As crazy as it is, this article does help explain a bit both Trump and BoJo's choices in the crisis."

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/americas/2020-03-30/us-economy-uniquely-vulnerable-coronavirus

Quote:The U.S. Economy Is Uniquely Vulnerable to the Coronavirus

Two competing epidemiological models currently guide and divide expert opinion on how best to respond to the novel coronavirus. The first, from Imperial College London, scared the U.S. and British governments into instituting strict social-distancing measures. It predicted that if left unchecked, COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, could kill over half a million people in the United ...

www.foreignaffairs.com

In contrast, countries with growth models of the Anglo-American variety, especially the United States, tend to have weaker states, lower taxes, and large financial sectors. They have highly flexible labor markets rather than large welfare states, which means they ultimately depend on wages to drive growth. Since those wages have been buying less and less over time, credit cards, student loans, and medical debts have become a standard part of U.S. household budgeting. When those household budgets shrink sharply, their debts are not compensated by the shock absorbers that countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany have in place. When systems such as the American one are hit by shocks, they tend to bail out their financial systems to keep credit flowing and let the real economy absorb the blow through unemployment and austerity policies. The assumption is that with no shock absorbers in place, prices and wages will adjust quickly, capital will be redeployed, and growth will return without the need for state intervention.
[...]

Because the model is designed to adjust through reduced wages and employment rather than increased welfare outlays, political leaders can contemplate temporary unemployment benefits for a banking-induced shock, but not semipermanent cash transfers—which is what the British are doing—and a near-total collapse in asset values. The British solution is too politically toxic to be anything other than a short-term expedient in the American context. So, once it became clear that—at least according to the Imperial College London model—the epidemiologically correct response was to put the economy in hibernation for several months, U.S. leaders started looking for other solutions.
One alternative solution, put forth by U.S. President Donald Trump but with proponents in many states, is to simply “restart the economy.” The direct cost of doing so, according to the Imperial College London model, could be the deaths of as many as 2.2 million Americans—or, as Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick bluntly suggested in a recent interview, old people need to die to save the economy.

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"Now, as a eurocommie, I'll reiterate my position that this entire crisis just highlights the ultimate failure, both moral and technical, of unregulated capitalism. I'm even starting to think it might lead to actual revolutions in thinking in the next couple of years.

However, this article also suggests that this crisis is actually destroying the US economy. As in, for good. If just half of this article is correct, then the US has definitely lost the n°1 spot to China.

Which might also raise several very tricky questions for the future of the world economy as a whole... As I understand it, China's ownership of US debt (about 1 trillion $) is supposed to protect us all from a full-blown trade war... But what if the US economy is beyond saving? Wouldn't dealing it the death blow become attractive to Xi Jinping? At the very least, China has a lot of good cards in its hands right hand, and the US a lot of bad ones... This might explain why Trump (and Republicans) seem genuinely willing to let 1M to 2M elderly Americans die to save the economy... Maybe.

Not that any of this is good news for anyone. The US still is #1 militarily, and I've always thought that the US will nto be afraid to flex its military muscles to compensate for a shrinking economy.

TL;DR: buckle up, this might just be the beginning."

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FYI -- Wuhan re-opened the wet markets.

 Between climate catastrophe and the people who think like the above, the utter ignorance and cruelty and selfishness of those whose hands already drip with blood,  it's easy to see the planet ridding herself of homo saps in about ten years.