Hey Spud!  It looks like they’re closing down a bunch of Steak and Shakes.  You’ll have to find a new place.  It doesn’t have to be classy, but it does help.

Once again, I have brought you chicanery without having to give NYTimes a click!

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics officially validated what we already knew: Just a few months into the COVID-19 crisis, America already has a Great Depression level of unemployment. But that’s not the same thing as saying that we’re in a depression. We won’t know whether that’s true until we see whether extremely high unemployment lasts for a long time, say a year or more.

Unfortunately, the Trump administration and its allies are doing all they can to make a full-scale depression more likely.

Before I get there, a word about that unemployment report. Notice that I didn’t say “the worst unemployment since the Great Depression”; I said “a Great Depression level,” a much stronger statement.

To understand why I said that, you need to read the report, not just look at the headline numbers. An unemployment rate of 14.7% is pretty horrific, but the bureau included a note indicating that technical difficulties probably caused this number to understate true unemployment by almost five percentage points.

If this is true, we currently have an unemployment rate around 20%, which would be worse than all but the worst two years of the Great Depression. The question now is how quickly we can recover.

Depends.  We already went and fucked over the Zoomers, lets see if we can fuck over their kids!

If we could get the coronavirus under control, recovery could indeed be very rapid. True, recovery from the 2008 financial crisis took a long time, but this had a lot to do with problems that had accumulated during the housing bubble, notably an unprecedented level of household debt. There don’t seem to be comparable problems now.

…either that or it took ten years for the markets to adjust to the Fed’s supposedly consequence free monetary policy, banks bailed out on billions $$$ of forclosed mortgages, $10 billion dollars per month spent on the Iraq war, and overregulating 1/6 of the economy in the form of Obamacare.

But getting the virus under control doesn’t mean “flattening the curve,” which, by the way, we did — we managed to slow the spread of COVID-19 enough that our hospitals weren’t overwhelmed. It means crushing the curve: getting the number of infected Americans way down, then maintaining a high level of testing to quickly spot new cases, combined with contact tracing so that we can quarantine those who may have been exposed.

To get to that point, however, we would need, first, to maintain a rigorous regime of social distancing for however long it takes to reduce new infections to a low level. And then we would have to protect all Americans with the kind of testing and tracing that is already available to people who work directly for Donald Trump, but almost nobody else.

Crushing the curve isn’t easy, but it’s very possible. In fact, many other countries, from South Korea to New Zealand to, believe it or not, Greece have already done it.

Bringing the infection rate way down was a lot easier for countries that acted quickly to contain the coronavirus, while the rate was still low, rather than spending many weeks in denial. But even places with severe outbreaks can bring their numbers down if they stay the course. Consider New York City, the original epicenter of the U.S. pandemic, where the numbers of new daily cases and deaths are only a small fraction of what they were a few weeks ago.

But you do have to stay the course. And that’s what Trump and company don’t want to do.

They don’t want to move the goalposts?  I might be an old bat, but you only have to remember back in march when they sold this flattening if the precious, precious curve as a way to keep our hospitals from being overrun by chinese zombies launching virus loaded ejaculate all over our faces, and choking us to death.

For a while it seemed as if the Trump administration was, at long last, willing to take COVID-19 seriously. In mid-March the administration introduced social distancing guidelines, although without actually imposing any federal regulations.

But lately all we hear from the White House is that we need to reopen the economy, even though we’re nowhere close to where we’d need to be to do so without risking a second wave of infections.

At the same time, the administration and its allies are apparently dead set against providing the financial aid that would let us sustain social distancing without extreme financial hardship. Extend enhanced unemployment benefits, which will expire July 31? “Over our dead bodies,” says Sen. Lindsey Graham. Aid to state and local governments, which have already laid off 1 million workers? That, says, Mitch McConnell, would be a “blue-state bailout.”

It only seems like this because NY is a “blue state” snd they seem to be the only one caught with their panties down.

As Andy Slavitt, who ran Medicare and Medicaid under Barack Obama, puts it, Trump is a quitter. Faced with the need to actually do his job and do what it takes to crush the pandemic, he just gave up.

How does Federalism work again?  Letting the states figure their way out is not the same thing as giving up.  Nit that I expect you or some Obama hack to know that.

And this retreat from responsibility won’t just kill thousands. It might also turn the COVID slump into a depression.

Here’s how it would work: Over the next few weeks, many red states abandon social distancing policies, while many individuals, taking their cues from Trump and Fox News, begin behaving irresponsibly. This leads, briefly, to some rise in employment.

But fairly soon it becomes clear that COVID-19 is spiraling out of control. People retreat back into their homes, whatever Trump and Republican governors may say.

So we’re back where we started in economic terms, and in worse shape than ever in epidemiological terms. As a result, the period of double-digit unemployment, which might have lasted only a few months, goes on and on.

In other words, Trump’s search for an easy way out, his lack of patience for the hard work of containing a pandemic, may be precisely what turns a severe but temporary slump into a full-blown depression.

A depression caused by statism.  But you want to keep doing it because government dick soothes and massages your aging, statist prostate.  This was not underlying weakness, market fluctuations, or even the markets adjusting to changing times it was the government forcing people to not leave their house and engage in commerce.  First amendment rights were ignored, second amendment, fourth, fifth, and even sixth amendment rights have been infringed upon during these lockdowns.  Then what hits ya?  You think people showing up to protest in tactical gimp cosplay has nothing to do with self induced depression level unemployment, no no…its because people want a haircut or a bikini wax.  Kind of makes you wonder if other people arent patrolling their neighborhoods because in part because they think their local government is going to try and fuck them some more.

You know what killed more people historically than viruses? Poverty.

You know what drives poverty? Not having a job.

You know whats driving people to not have a job?  Shit stains like YOu!

but you knew that!  Supposedly your some kind of economist when your head isnt shoved up your white ass.