The initial jobless claims for the US from the last month’s worth of data are over 22 million. That’s over 8% of the entire adult population of the country forced out of their jobs by the government in just a month! I expect the government will be changing the way they calculate unemployment again to keep the official number down. There aren’t any recent bankruptcy numbers available, but certainly many of those people worked for small businesses that won’t survive. Everyone likes to focus on huge corporations, but the vast majority of businesses in the US are small independent companies that lack the corporations’ ability to bribe politicians for a bailout.
People have been talking about how this could be as bad as the Great Depression, but I think that’s incredibly optimistic. The Great Depression was caused by the government of a single country (albeit a very large and wealthy one) meddling in the economy. What we’re seeing now is most of the world’s governments actively trying to destroy the economy, countries not falling to mass hysteria being relatively few and poor—Sweden is the most prominent case of sane behavior, but although Sweden is a wealthy and highly industrialized country, it has a population smaller than many cities. This deliberate world-wide attempt to cripple our civilization using mass hysteria as an excuse is unprecedented. What do our rulers think is going to happen when hundreds of millions of desperate people all over the world can’t afford food or shelter?
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