Those businesses aren't going to be doing any better when their customers and employees are dead or sick or too afraid of infection to go into them
Right. The businesses which shuttered due to the spring lockdown aren't going to "do better". Their employees don't have a place to go back to work. There are no "non-essential" businesses as far as the economy and jobs are concerned. Yes, more people staying home and not shopping locally for "luxury" goods results in a recession as sales decrease temporarily. The shut downs produce devastation if they go on too long. Unemployed people don't contribute to the economy. That isn't sustainable.
I repeat...because you seemed to not understand "Those businesses aren't going to be doing any better when their customers and employees are dead or sick or too afraid of infection to go into them"
I know a lot about common sense. I won't get into my attitude about economics. You already know it. It has one large city - Vancouver - and a smaller one - Victoria. Pretty easy to manage that compared to a country with a huge population and a crumbling culture. I didn't mention Australia, let alone compare it to anything. Australia shares one thing in common with BC and that most of the land is wilderness. He screwed up terribly by promoting forced business closures. I will never forgive him for that. It was beyond authoritarian. It removed personal choice. It promoted the loss of freedom. I see a role for government in informing people about the outbreak and providing guidance for fighting it. I see no role for government to destroy 10's of thousands of businesses and the millions of people hurt by it. .....and to provide more economic ignorance to spend trillions of dollars to try to fix the original authoritarian mistake. I view it as the height of incompetence. As a businessman he should have known better. Ah well, it will all be over one way or another on November 4. Then we can open the schools and the businesses.
Then shut everything down until everything is perfectly safe which some experts say could take years. Jobs and income don’t matter. Philistine concerns right?
Yes and they are opening up because of the loss of taxes. Just like in the US. Yes philistine concerns. Money trumps everything!
They are opening because they bent the curve. We did not. Money does Trump everything, including peoples lives...
If we get COVID-19 new cases down, people will resume shopping and going out. If we don't, many small businesses will die a slow death. What we should do is help businesses--yeah, with $$$--required to modify their operations or shut down. No, I just showed you evidence of intentions and actual spending. A lot of people won't go shopping, dine out, travel, or send their kids to school, even if we open up. Getting the new case count way down and instituting measures to keep it there is the way to bridge to when we have a cure, effective treatment, or vaccine. It's time to correct the narrative that opening up quickly will save business. Republican Senators are already trying to cut back on spending programs keeping food on the table. They're spinning the same narrative you are. In WW2, we took 17m men out of the workforce (132m Americans in 1940) and all they could have produced, then took much of what the rest of us made and came up with 300,000 planes, 50 aircraft carriers, and so on. Tens of millions of Americans took their salaries and put them into war bonds. After the war, there was a huge demand for goods and services. My father came back from the Marines to his job as an aeronautical engineer and even with a good job and couldn't buy a new car until 1949. We can shut down parts of the economy and not put folks on breadlines. I was an economist, so I take the economy seriously, too.
No they opened because they saw tax revenue shrinking. Government will always protect itself Uber alles!
I understand that most customers and employees are not going to end up dead and that the majority of the sick have mild cases. "Fear" is the item which only some people are buying into, rationally or irrationally. I understand this: I understand this:
They opened back up, after they bent the curve, most of them following medical advice. But brownie points for absurd fiction.
More fiction, no country is anywhere near herd immunity. Fact is, these countries bent the curve, and we did not. "On March 12, two weeks after the first Covid-19 case was diagnosed in the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte held a press conference at which he asked—asked, not ordered—everyone in the country to work from home as much as possible. Two days later, Locatus data showed that foot traffic on busy retail streets such as Kalverstraat dropped by roughly 80%." They did a lockdown, they just didn't call it that. The Netherlands has a history of working with it's people, and vice versa, that we could never match. I know the government said they wanted to build "population immunity", but they never came within a country mile of it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/feat...coronavirus-lockdown-dutch-followed-the-rules
Your "attitude about economics" and "common sense" isn't enough. You're flat wrong. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/data/statistics/people-population-community/population/pop_bc_estimatesby_subprov_areas_2011_2019.xlsx In all of BC, there are just 17 people hospitalized for COVID-19. Australia (25m people) is also an urban culture. So far, 145 COVID-19 deaths. I can't tell you how absurd I think this is. You just don't get it. Without a massive input of money, the economy is going to FAIL if we don't figure out how to get the new case down. Your approach won't do that.
Wow. Good news! The majority of my customers won’t die after being at my place of business! That’ll bring em in!
True. Most of your customers won't die after shopping at your place of business. That is, if the government "allows" you to open the doors to the business you invested in, and your customers can actually shop, so you can pay the monthly lease, insurance, payroll and other overhead costs.
I think people like to think they have the ability to be in control of things involving nature. So we desperately want to believe that we can control this virus by not only believing in face masks and lockdowns but legislating them therefore deciding what others should do as well so that we feel safe. Same is true of “man made climate change”. Oh my God we say, look at what we’ve done to the planet but it’s ok we created the problem so we can fix it. The befuddling twist is the new children’s crusade led by Greta with no credentials, so there are rudiments of the medieval in it. It is weirdly arrogant. Man has come a long way technologically but nature will still regularly best us. Time to make peace with that truth.
With a .65 or lower infection fatality rate, you don't have to worry too much about that. The people forced onto welfare over the shutdown have much more to worry about.
Sweden Has Become the World’s Cautionary Tale Its decision to carry on in the face of the pandemic has yielded a surge of deaths without sparing its economy from damage — a red flag as the United States and Britain move to lift lockdowns. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/07/business/sweden-economy-coronavirus.html