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March 26, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:55
It’s Raining Cash | Ep. 980
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The Senate unanimously passes a massive government spending plan, 3.3 million Americans are now out of work, and coronavirus begins to hit New York City hospitals.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
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All righty, so let's go right into the latest updates.
We now know that some 3.3 million Americans are out of work as of like this week.
The jobless claims have shot up massively this week, according to CNBC.
Americans displaced by coronavirus crisis filed unemployment claims in record numbers last week.
The Labor Department reported Thursday a surge.
To 3.28 million.
That is an increase of about 3 million people in the course of one week alone.
One week alone.
The number shatters the Great Recession peak of 665,000 in March 2009 and the all-time mark of 695,000 in October 1982.
And the all-time mark of 695,000 in October 1982, the previous week, was 282,000.
So we shot up 3 million lost jobs in one week.
So when people tell you, don't worry about the economy, this is all about saving lives, just understand the economy has some pretty real ramifications for the 3 million people who just lost their jobs.
No doubt most of those people are hourly workers, or blue collar workers, or people who are not making $150,000 a year.
Consensus estimates from economists surveyed by Dow Jones showed an expectation for 1.5 million at new claims, but individual forecasts on Wall Street had been anticipating a much higher number.
The surge comes amid a crippling slowdown brought on by the coronavirus crisis.
Well, to be fair, that is not brought on just by consumer activity.
That is brought on by state and federal governments and international governments everywhere telling people that they must stay in their homes.
It turns out that it's hard to shop and it makes you a little bit leery about spending your money when you're not sure if you're going to have a job in five minutes and also when you cannot go outside.
Turns out that really cuts down on the capacity of the economy to keep moving.
The four-week moving average, which smoothed out weekly distortions, was $1.7 million, an increase of $27,500 from the previous week's revised average.
The major stock indices did open higher, wiping out sharp earlier losses, and that is because Everybody sort of expected this was coming.
This is already priced in.
Everybody knew that when you shut down the economy forcibly from the outside, the way this has happened, that that means that there's going to be a major spike in unemployment.
That is why the Senate voted 96-0 yesterday for the largest spending bill in the history of the United States to determine whether this sort of government shutdown of all human activity was necessary.
One of the things that we're going to have to look at is the international scene.
We're going to have to at some point here make, and it makes a big difference too, to how the United States reacts from here on in.
What is the plan for reopening the economy?
What is the plan for getting back to some semblance of normalcy?
Was it the right move to shut down the schools?
Was it the right move to shut down all businesses?
Was all of this the right move?
Now, based on available information, the answer seems to be yes, because you don't want to turn into Italy.
But what if it turns out that Italy is the outlier and, for example, the UK is much more close to the norm?
What if it turns out that South Korea is a little closer to the norm and Spain is closer to the outlier?
We don't know the answers to these questions.
So in a second, we're gonna look at some of the international stories and where this thing is going because this thing is slowing down in Italy.
Now, it is possible to say both.
That yes, you needed the hard stop because Italy required everybody to lock down for like three weeks in order to start seeing a day-on-day decline in new cases.
It is also possible to say that maybe we should have taken the Swedish approach.
Sweden didn't shut down its economy nearly at all.
We're gonna get to this in just one second.
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Okay, so where do we stand right now domestically and internationally?
Well, domestically, we are all worried we're about to become Italy.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti warned of mass death and condemned false hope, presumably that false hope coming from President Trump, on Wednesday.
He told LA residents that they will be confined to their homes until at least May.
Okay, it is now, last I checked, March 26th.
So that means another month of people being confined to their homes.
Garcetti said, I think this is at least two months.
Be prepared for even longer.
Garcetti pushed back against what he called premature optimism in the face of COVID-19, saying that leaders who suggest we're on the verge of business as usual are putting lives at risk.
He says, I can't say that strongly enough.
He says, giving people false hope will crush their spirits, will kill more people.
Because it will instill a sense of normality, and people will start going back out and associating with one another, and then coronavirus will spike again.
He says this will not kill most of us, it will kill a lot more people than we're used to dying around us.
Garcetti said the city was anywhere from 6 to 12 days away from the fate of New York City, where a surge in patients with coronavirus is threatening to overwhelm the health system.
As of noon on Tuesday, LA County public health officials said that there were 662 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 11 confirmed deaths.
The actual numbers are no doubt higher, with officials only recently beginning to roll out testing.
Those numbers are higher on both ends, meaning it is way higher than 662 people in all of LA County who have COVID-19, and probably there are more people who have died of it, but just haven't been identified as victims of COVID-19 because we weren't really testing for it.
Now, the bottom number, that denominator, is significantly larger than the numerator, meaning that the death rate on coronavirus I mentioned yesterday is likely an order of magnitude lower than what the WHO is saying the death rate is, mainly because there are tons of silent cases running around, people who have not even experienced symptoms and who have coronavirus and are passing it on to others.
With that said, if this thing is super, super duper transmissible, you can still swamp emergency rooms, you can still swamp ventilators and ICUs, if there are just tons of people who end up with it.
Right?
If the raw number is very large, even if the rate is very small, the ICUs are not based on percentages.
The ICUs are based on the raw number of beds available.
The ventilators are based on the raw number of ventilators available.
Garcetti says the main horrifying thing I keep thinking about, and every local leader is being kept awake, is the projection of how many people will get this, the projection of what the mortality rate will be, how many dead we will have.
Will we have hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands?
That's what keeps us up.
Okay, so, in New York City, there are already articles about apocalyptic surges at a New York City hospital, and it's important to sort of parse what here is apocalyptic and what is not.
Obviously, we're going to see hospitals that are crushed under the weight of this thing.
We're obviously going to see overcrowding.
So far, the ICUs have not been overcrowded.
What I mean by that is that they will be.
I mean, there's very little doubt that over the next week, two weeks, that there will be more people who need ICU beds than ICU beds available.
There'll be more people who need ventilators than ventilators available, although there's some new breakthroughs in terms of ventilator technology.
that have been put out there and that are pretty fascinating and could actually ratchet up the number of ventilators available in fairly short order, which would be supremely important, obviously.
But with that said, the crisis right now that you're seeing in the New York Times is them saying there's not enough morgue space.
Okay, not enough morgue space is a bad thing, but you can make morgue space pretty easily.
And everybody sort of acknowledges that that just requires a federal go ahead.
The morgue space is not the big issue here, because those people, Not to be coarse about this, but those people are already dead.
I mean, what we really need are the resources to keep the people who are alive, alive.
And so the question is, when do we hit that point?
We were already hearing that by Tuesday, the system was going to be overwhelmed.
You remember Andrew Cuomo said that.
He said that by earlier this week, the system was already going to be overwhelmed.
That doesn't mean the system won't be overwhelmed.
It doesn't mean that the system won't be put, you know, basically peddled to the metal, but it does mean that It has not quite yet done this, right?
And Andrew Cuomo is even admitting as much, right?
Andrew Cuomo says that they have in fact dramatically slowed the rate of increase already, and this thing has only been locked down for like a week and a half, right?
Here's Andrew Cuomo suggesting that the rate of increase in New York City has been decreased fairly dramatically.
Westchester, we have dramatically slowed what was an exponential increase.
So again, on the good news side, can you slow the rate of infection?
Yes.
How do you know?
Look at what we did in Westchester.
That was the hottest cluster in the United States of America.
We closed the schools, we closed gatherings, we brought in testing, and we have dramatically slowed the increase.
Okay, Bill de Blasio, the awful mayor of New York, he says half of New Yorkers will be infected, but the question isn't how many people will be infected.
You have to assume tons and tons of people will be or already have been infected with coronavirus.
The real question is, over what period of time and do we have the medical resources necessary to deal with those people?
Here's idiot communist mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, who was going to the gym five minutes ago while telling everybody else they couldn't go to the gym five minutes ago.
Groundhog killer Bill de Blasio.
Probably more than half of all New Yorkers will be infected with this disease.
Thank God for the vast majority.
It will be a very limited, mild experience, but for a lot of other people, it's going to be really tough.
And we're going to lose some people.
And our job is to make sure that we save every single New Yorker we can.
Okay, so that amounts to slowing the transmissions, as Cuomo was talking about, and it amounts to ratcheting up the number of ICU beds and ventilators available.
What'll be really interesting to see from a social science perspective and from a data perspective is, in the end, how many ICU beds do we end up needing?
How wrong are the models, or how right are the models?
In a second, we're going to examine The possibility that some of these models are supremely wrong about the number of people who are going to end up needing ICU beds.
I have an example from the UK.
I mean, this is optimistic, right?
Maybe not.
Maybe, maybe this is totally wrong.
Maybe we do get hit like Italy gets hit, but maybe not.
I'm going to bring you some news about that in just one second, courtesy of our friends in the United Kingdom.
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Okay.
As I say, in New York City right now, there's a lot of talk about the hospitals being full.
They're getting close to full, but they've not been overwhelmed as of yet.
And we were told they were going to be overwhelmed earlier this week.
Again, this does not mean that they're not going to be overwhelmed in the next week and a half.
It does mean that we are ramping up supplies.
We are ramping up ventilators.
We are ramping up ICU beds.
So according to the New York Times, which is already, you know, pulling the trigger on everything is apocalyptic, they say 13 deaths in a day, an apocalyptic coronavirus surge at a New York City hospital.
Okay, first of all, let's just point out, lots of people die at hospitals.
Lots and lots of people die at hospitals.
That does not mean a surge didn't happen at this hospital.
It does mean that 13 deaths in a day at a hospital is actually not a supremely large number.
Where you start to pull the parachute, where you start to pull the panic button and hit the panic button, is when you're seeing 50, 60 deaths a day from one source at a hospital.
In several hours on Tuesday, Dr. Ashley Bray performed chest compressions at Elmhurst Hospital Center on a woman in her 80s, a man in his 60s, and a 38-year-old who reminded the doctor of her fiancé all had tested positive for coronavirus and had gone into cardiac arrest.
All eventually died.
Elmhurst is a 545-bed public hospital in Queens has begun transferring patients not suffering from coronavirus to other hospitals as it moves toward becoming dedicated entirely to the outbreak.
And this is what you would expect, right?
Outlying hospitals are now being inundated with patients who do not have coronavirus so we can shift resources to urban centers where coronavirus is likely to hit the hardest, which makes perfect sense.
This is what Italy did not do.
Italy got overwhelmed because Italy did not have the capacity to bring other patients from Northern Italy to other areas of Italy, and this ended up with massive levels of overwhelm in the system.
This is why if you go to Southern Italy, the death rates from coronavirus are nowhere near the death rates from coronavirus in Northern Italy.
Why?
They're part of the same country.
Presumably tons of people are still getting coronavirus in Southern Italy and in Rome.
Well, perhaps the reason is because the medical system in Northern Italy was not prepared for this and they could not shift resources fast enough.
Also worth noting, by the way, Italy is a unique country in that a huge percentage of people who live in Italy live with their parents, and that makes an enormous difference in terms of transmission rates.
In fact, if you look at the countries that are being hardest hit right now, the share of the population aged 30 to 49 living with their parents, Italy it's 23%, and in the US it is 6.4%.
Which is closer to Germany or the UK.
Which means that infections of the elderly are going to be less prevalent in places like the UK, Germany, the US, Sweden, France.
The prevalence of elderly people getting this thing is going to be a lot lower than in Italy where pretty much 1 in 5 people aged 30 to 49 lives with their parents.
Meanwhile, the New York Times continues.
A refrigerated truck has been stationed outside to hold the bodies of the dead.
Over the past 24 hours, New York City's public hospital system said in a statement, 13 people at Elmhurst had died.
It's apocalyptic, said Dr. Bray, 27, a general medicine resident at the hospital.
Across the city, hospitals are beginning to confront the kind of harrowing surge in cases that has overwhelmed other healthcare systems in China, Italy, and other countries.
Okay, they're confronting it, but Does that mean that they are overwhelmed yet?
Not necessarily, right?
Cuomo said that that social distancing that has been effective in tamping down the growth, he said that it's almost too good to be true.
He said this week the state's hospitalization estimations were down markedly from a doubling of cases every two days to every four days, which is a dramatic slowing.
Hospitals are under siege, says the New York Times.
New York City's hospitals run the gamut from prestigious teaching institutions catering to the elite to public hospitals providing care for some of the poorest communities in the nation.
Regardless of whom they serve, few have been spared the impact of the pandemic.
A flood of sick and fearful New Yorkers has besieged emergency rooms across the city.
But again, nowhere in this article does it say that the system has yet been overwhelmed.
Now, again, I keep saying this.
It could be, right?
We could see it overwhelmed.
All of the more than 1,800 ICU beds in the city are expected to be full by Friday, according to a FEMA briefing obtained by the New York Times, and patients could stay there for weeks, limiting space for newly sickened people.
But every day we buy in order to Create more ICUs in order to create more ventilators is a day that less people are going to die.
Because again, until those beds are full and we have overwhelm like in Italy, you're not going to see the sorts of mass death you see in Italy.
Cuomo said he hoped that officials could quickly add units by dipping into a growing supply of ventilators.
The federal government is sending a 1,000-bed hospital ship to New York.
It's not scheduled to arrive until mid-April.
Officials have begun erecting four 250-bed hospitals at the Javits Convention Center in Mintown, Manhattan.
That could be ready in a week.
Also, officials are discussing converting hotels and arenas into temporary medical centers.
Now, again, talking about how they are filling up morgues, that's not the end of the world.
Buried deep in this article talking about the apocalypse is a spokeswoman for the city's office saying, quote, we have significant morgue capacity in our five citywide sites and the ability to expand.
So, the notion that everybody has been completely overwhelmed at this point, and that people are dying in the waiting room in the same way that has been happening in Italy, so far, not true.
So far, that is not true.
So, again, could be true, but we're buying time right now.
Now, why does this make me a little bit more optimistic?
Well, because there's a report out of the UK, according to NewScientist.com, The UK, according to the experts, now has enough ICU units for coronavirus patients.
So, one week ago, they were saying that the UK was going to get hit with like 230,000 deaths, that the UK was going to get completely overwhelmed, that the system was going to be completely overloaded, and lo and behold, a week later, they're like, oh no, actually, we have enough ICU beds.
Neil Ferguson at Imperial College of London, that is the source of the study, by the way, that suggested that 2.2 million people would die if there was no social distancing in the United States.
He gave evidence today into the UK Parliamentary's Select Committee on Science and Technology.
He said that expected increases in NHS capacity and ongoing restrictions to people's movements make him reasonably confident the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks.
UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could in fact be much lower.
Well, that's only an order of magnitude off from what the Imperial College study originally suggested.
Now, it is easy to say, OK, that's social distancing.
It's shutting down the economy.
But if that is the case, then that's going to bear some serious questions as to whether you actually needed to have this complete shutdown in the same way or, alternatively, how soon we can get out from a complete shutdown.
Because here's the reality.
Right?
Sweden didn't do any of this stuff.
And Sweden is not experiencing the same sort of overwhelm that Italy is.
It turns out that different countries are different.
By the way, even in Italy, this is a good piece of news, even in Italy, while the deaths continue to be extremely high, like 683 new deaths in Italy yesterday, the spread does keep slowing day on day.
This has been happening for about four or five days.
For the fourth day in a row, the total number of cases in the country was rising at a slower pace than usual.
This is the flattening of the curve beginning to actually happen in Italy, which is the country hardest hit by all of this, and by a large margin, the country where most people have died.
Confirmed contagions rose by 6% from Tuesday to reach 57,521 in Italy.
The total number of recovered patients is already over 9,000 in Italy.
We're going to get to Sweden in just one second because, again, we need comps.
We need to compare.
Where is the United States on these various curves?
What measures are we taking?
Were we going to be Italy or were we always going to be closer to the UK or France or Germany or Sweden?
They're very different.
There are lots of different variations in the treatment and in the transmission because people associate differently in different countries, right?
Italy has been particularly hard hit.
Spain is being hard hit also.
Their medical systems Nationalized healthcare systems, by the way.
Not very good.
Really, not very good.
They've got some serious problems over there.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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So as I say, Good piece of news from the UK.
They're not gonna get overwhelmed.
They're now saying Imperial College, right, that was the source of the study that said hundreds of thousands would die, is now saying under 20,000 people will probably die in Great Britain, which is, in fact, a flu season.
Okay, now, that does not mean this was like the flu.
Okay, we shut down in a way we never have for the flu.
And we're gonna get flu-like numbers anyway.
But it is indicative of the fact that some of the rates, the death rates, that were originally put out there were just not true.
And it is indicative of the fact that A full-throated public debate is going to need to be had in the future about how we deal with this kind of stuff without completely shutting down the world economy.
Because look at Sweden, okay?
According to the Financial Times, Sweden has become an international outlier in its response to the deadly coronavirus outbreak.
They kept their schools open.
They adopted few other restrictions.
The Scandinavian nation has been embarking on what one health expert called a huge experiment.
This is according, again, to the Financial Times.
Since the UK went into lockdown on Monday evening, Sweden is now the largest European country with the fewest limits on where people can go and what they can do.
By the way, remember, the UK only went on full lockdown like this week and they're already saying...
That in order of magnitude, less people are going to die than they predicted in that Imperial College study.
Schools for children up to the age of 16 remain open.
Many people continue to go to work.
Packed commuter trains and buses were reported this week in the capital of Stockholm.
Sweden stands out at the moment, said Carl Bildt, the former prime minister.
Swedish authorities have banned gatherings of more than 500 people.
They closed universities and higher education colleges.
They advised workers to stay home if possible.
Authorities on Tuesday ordered restaurants and bars only to serve people at tables rather than at the bar so that they could create some sort of social distancing.
Local media have been full of stories of thousands of people gathering at Swedish ski resorts, which until Saturday were completely open.
The virus has been spreading easily in mountain resorts in Austria and Italy as well.
Johan Carlsen, the head of Sweden's public health agency, last week defended Sweden's approach, said the country, quote, cannot take draconian measures that have a limited impact on the epidemic but knock out the functions of society.
So presumably the Democrats would accuse the Swedish health minister of favoring dollars over human lives because this is the stupid political game we play in the United States where we pretend that public policy is not about balancing risks and rewards.
It's all about if you can save one life.
Which, by the way, is the last refuge of the political scoundrel.
If you can just save one life.
And before you say, but you're anti-abortion.
That's not about saving one life.
That's about the deliberate killing of a human being.
That's not quite the same thing as deciding a public policy risks and rewards.
Carlson conceded the 90,000 figure for the number of people who die annually in Sweden would increase significantly if the healthcare system became overburdened, but there have been just over 2,000 reported COVID-19 cases in Sweden and 33 deaths, compared to 6,000 deaths in Italy, Europe's worst affected country.
Sweden's state epidemiologist, he said the future still looks manageable.
He argued schools should stay open because otherwise you have kids who transmit the disease who are home with parents and grandparents, which by the way is 100% true.
A number of Swedish health experts disagree.
It's always easier to say that everything should be shut down and then certain things should remain open.
So Sweden's going to be a fascinating case study.
If it turns out that Sweden is less hard hit than a bunch of countries that have been issuing nationwide lockdowns, it's one thing to do this in Italy where the thing's already hit, right?
It's another thing to do this preemptively in the UK.
And then four days later, you're saying, by the way, we do have enough ICU beds and we have enough ventilators.
I mean, unless they dramatically secretly ramped up ICU beds and ventilators, that means that the original estimates were quite wrong.
And again, none of this is to argue that in the United States we don't need a full stop, given what we knew about the epidemic when we knew about the epidemic.
It does mean that all of these estimates that we're going to have to keep the economy completely shuttered until June or July are kind of crazy.
They're kind of crazy based on what we currently know.
Now, again, all of that could change.
This is incredibly fluid.
We could see the system begin to be overwhelmed.
I keep hedging my bets here because I am not afraid of saying the three words that apparently every other person on this subject is afraid of saying.
I don't know.
You don't know.
Nobody knows.
So, I'm giving you a wide variety of data so that you can make the best available judgment about what's happening.
One of the things that has happened here is that we started off with the possibility of extreme economic loss balanced against the possibility of extreme loss of life.
Right?
That was the initial assessment.
And we said, okay, the possibility of extreme economic loss takes a backseat to the possibility of extreme loss of human life.
Totally on board with that.
What happens when it's the possibility of extreme loss of human life?
And that's diminishing.
Because as we get more data in, it looks a little better than we thought it was going to.
We were bending the curve in New York.
We're bending the curve in Washington state.
And that possibility of extreme economic loss is no longer a possibility.
It is a hard reality with millions of people losing their jobs.
If you're talking about a 100% possibility of a Great Depression for the United States economically versus a 10% possibility of a pandemic that was in line with any of the original estimates, at what point do you start to say, OK, we may need to tailor our policies a little bit differently?
Is it 1% possibility?
Is it 0% possibility?
And what if the best available estimates at this point are in fact an order of magnitude lower than they were even a week or two ago when data were still coming in, when it looked like Italy could not flatten its curve, when it looked like the UK might be hit with hundreds of thousands of deaths?
What if it turns out that in the United States, what we're talking about is not a million point one deaths, as some epidemiologists were originally suggesting.
I thought that was way overblown immediately, but let's say it's not 1.1 million deaths.
Let's say that what we're actually talking about in the United States is something like Great Britain, meaning that we're talking 50 to 100,000 deaths.
OK, now that's a horrible, horrible number.
It also happens to be that you're talking about the loss of millions upon millions of jobs.
And that does have a pretty significant impact on people's lives.
You're talking about the complete shutdown of the world economy.
And to pretend that that is not a counterweight is silly.
Also, you have to determine whether the difference that you're talking about making in completely shutting down society makes the difference between, say, 50,000 deaths and 500,000 deaths, or whether you're talking about the difference between 50,000 deaths and 70,000 deaths.
I know it's forbidden to talk about this stuff.
You're not allowed to talk about this stuff.
Every public policy decision comes down to talking about this stuff.
I'm not saying I have an answer.
I am saying that if you're not asking the questions, and if our public policymakers are not asking the questions, they are not doing their job.
This is literally their job.
Their job is to determine the various costs and benefits of various public policies.
We do it every single day, and to not do it in the midst of, one, a global pandemic, and two, the greatest economic shutdown in the history of mankind.
Okay, that's what this is right now.
The greatest economic shutdown in the history of mankind?
That would be absolutely foolish.
And I don't care what sort of bumper sticker sloganeering you suggest, you know, the, the, we can't even ask these questions because now you're taking human life lightly.
I'm absolutely not taking human life lightly.
I'm also not taking anybody's economic livelihood lightly.
I'm not taking people's jobs lightly.
We have to take all of this seriously.
And if you're not taking one aspect of this seriously, it's because you're not a serious person.
Sorry, you're not.
If you just say, okay, everything is justified in order to stop the number of deaths from being 50,000 plus one versus just 50,000, that's because you're not a serious person.
You're not.
Okay?
Because maybe the cost is worth it, and maybe the cost is not.
We make those decisions every single day in American public policy.
We do.
And meanwhile, as I say, Washington State case growth has declined.
We are seeing the Italian curve being flattened, and fairly dramatically, by the way.
It's been declining fairly steadily in terms of the rate of growth for days on end, for actually weeks now.
It's had some up and downs, but the trend line is fairly clear at this point.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
We'll talk about the economic impact, which of course has been absolutely dramatic on American society.
As I say, the certainty of economic loss is very real now.
Now the possibility of loss of American life is still uncertain.
We don't know what the percentages are, and no one apparently in the public health world is being honest about their assessments.
They won't give us any numbers on what percentage chance you think it is that it's actually $500,000 versus what percentage chance that it's $20,000.
Where's the sliding scale here?
Without that data, it's very difficult to argue for a reopening, but maybe that's the whole point.
We'll get to more of this in just one second.
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So, as I say, the economic Certainty of loss is now quite real, okay?
And the possibility of mass death, it's still out there, but we don't know exactly how high it is.
This is what I've said.
Over the next two weeks, what we need from the federal government is a metric.
We need some sort of formula, right?
We don't know what the numbers are going to be for number of deaths versus number of cases.
We don't know any of that stuff yet, but we need a formula for when the number of deaths over the number of cases hits a certain rate, then step A kicks in and some of us go back to work.
And if that number declines further in terms of death rate and number of cases, then step B, more of us go back to work.
Like we need a plan at this point to get out of this because this is utterly unsustainable and because this is quickly turning into a political fight where some people are arguing that this is temporary and we need to do what we can to hold up the economy so that we can get back to work.
And other people are arguing we need to make this permanent.
And this is where crap gets seriously ugly.
OK, what we are in right now is global pandemic.
It's unprecedented in the history of Western, in the history of modern Economics.
This is unprecedented.
A forcible global economic shutdown.
Never happened before.
And some people are using this as an opportunity.
They're using it as an opportunity to talk about the permanent growth of American government.
And that is disgusting.
Okay, if you have turned this into your case for permanently growing the size and state of American government, not for getting through the crisis and going back to, you know, the greatest functional economy in the history of the world, that is because you're being a political hack.
And that is what we are watching right now in real time.
And that's like, I don't want to get political about this, but I'm not the one who made it political.
I thought we were all on the same page.
When the house is on fire, you put out the fire, but And when you got coronavirus, then maybe you need the hydroxychloroquine.
But there are some people who insist that it's not sufficient for us to take the hydroxychloroquine and the azithromycin and the zinc.
There are some people who are insistent that we down the fish tank cleaner.
You take the hydroxychloroquine now, but we need to make that permanent.
From now on, you're going to have to down a little bit of fish tank cleaner every day and destroy the American economy forever.
That is the direction that I'm seeing some people push when they talk about endless spending, when they talk about endless unemployment benefits, when they pretend that dealing with a crisis is the exact same thing as dealing with a non-crisis, and that the goal of this thing isn't to move us past what's going on right now.
We all agree on this.
That Senate bill last night passed 96-0.
There is no disagreement that we need to do something now to stop complete economic meltdown.
The question is, how many people out there are saying, well, now's the opportunity for us to completely shift our way of life because no crisis can go to waste.
So, how bad is the economic downturn here?
I mean, it's horrific.
The economic downturn is unprecedented, as I say, in American history and in human history.
We're looking at a 30% decline in GDP in one quarter.
Okay, that's nuts, obviously.
We have seen the local percentages of businesses open has dropped by 43% across America.
The percentage of hourly employees working has dropped by 55% across America.
So when people say, by the way, That we're just doing this to, when you talk about reopening the markets, it's to save the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
I promise you, Warren Buffett's still making money.
Jeff Bezos, doing okay.
People who are still wealthy, guess what?
They're still wealthy.
They didn't sell their stock.
They're still wealthy.
You know who's getting absolutely shellacked by this, by this forcible economic downturn?
Every small business owner, people who are operating on thin margins, every hourly employee of those businesses.
What do you think is happening to all the waiters?
What do you think is happening to all the cooks right now?
What do you think is happening to all the people who staff up all the local small businesses that you cannot go to anymore?
So when we say that, how dare you weigh all of the factors in determining public policy, why are you leaving those people out to dry?
Why are you pretending that those people's livelihoods and lives are completely a non-factor in how you determine public policy here?
I mean, obviously this stuff does matter and it should matter.
I mean, a huge percentage of US small businesses are going to run out of cash soon, which is why this was so necessary.
That's why it passed 96-0 in the Senate bill.
Over 20% of American businesses had enough cash to last a month, less than a month.
Between one and three months, almost 35% of American businesses, so over half of U.S.
small businesses say they would completely die within three months if sales stopped completely, which is exactly what is happening.
Almost no businesses can last up to a year without dying, without running out of cash, if they don't get a shot in the arm soon.
And you're seeing this with U.S.
home sales.
Bottom line here is that the economic realities are in fact realities, and that's something that we have to take into account.
And we have to take that into account along with all of the new data that's being brought in from the UK.
Again, I've yet to hear anybody in the federal or state government explain, when do we have enough ICU beds, that that's enough?
And the answer is that maybe they don't know.
We're gonna know in the next week or two.
And to pretend that we can't make those calculations or start to make those calculations is absolutely foolhardy.
Also, and at least a piece of good news, warm, humid weather could slow the coronavirus, according to new research, as Andrew Friedman and Simon Denyer reporting over at the Washington Post.
Apparently, the research on how the coronavirus behaves in various temperatures and humidity levels is demonstrating that upcoming changes of the seasons may actually slow this thing.
Multiple early studies provide evidence of statistical ties between temperature and humidity ranges and the geographic regions where the virus has thrived.
By the way, if this thing dies over the summer, even if we're hit with it cyclically, that would give us enough months to build up the ICU and ventilator capacity to handle it by, you would hope, September, October, right?
That would be the goal, right?
Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, he was out there saying this thing could be cyclical, right?
We could be hit with a wave now, and then it could die off during the summer, and then it could hit again.
But the cyclical nature of the thing means that you could send a lot of people back to work, and in the meantime, get your ass in gear and produce the masks and the ventilators and the beds that we need.
Here's Anthony Fauci yesterday saying this thing could in fact be cyclical.
Would this possibly become a seasonal cyclic thing?
And I've always indicated to you that I think it very well might.
And the reason I say that is that what we're starting to see now in the Southern Hemisphere, in Southern Africa, and in the Southern Hemisphere countries, is that we're having cases that are appearing as they go into their winter season.
And if, in fact, they have a substantial outbreak, it will be inevitable that we need to be prepared that we'll get a cycle around the second time.
Okay, but that gives us some time to actually build up the resources.
Plus, we're going to know in fairly short order, I think, how many people have already had this thing.
And then we'll actually have some real data.
There are microbiology labs that are already developing tests to detect if somebody has already been hit with coronavirus and is thus immune and can return to work.
Meanwhile, Deborah Birx, who's heading up the president's efforts on coronavirus, headed up the AIDS effort by the U.S.
government years ago.
She says the media are absolutely frightening people with salacious numbers.
The numbers they're putting out, the studies they're putting out, number of people dead, it's not going to look anything like that.
Here's Dr. Deborah Birx again.
Not President Trump, Dr. Deborah Birx making this point yesterday.
The numbers that have been put out there are actually very frightening to people.
But I can tell you, if you go back and look at Wuhan and Hubei and all of these provinces, When they talk about 60,000 people being infected, even if you said, oh right, well there's asymptomatics and all of that, so you get to 600,000 people out of 80 million.
That is nowhere close to the numbers that you see people putting out there.
I think it has frightened the American people.
I think on a model that you just run full out, you can get to those numbers if you have zero controls and you do nothing.
And we know that every American is doing something.
Okay, so all of that is true.
And again, the models that have been used and the ones that have been put out by the media, the ones that scare the living crap out of everybody, those models, like that Imperial College model, that was the one that went viral, not the Oxford University model that said that this thing was going to peter out fairly quickly and that it was an order of magnitude less deadly than we have originally been told.
The Imperial College model is totally wrong.
The British epidemiologist, I talked about this a moment ago, that British epidemiologist has admitted it was totally wrong.
UK will have enough beds.
It's on the order of 20,000 dead in the UK, not 200,000, not 2 million.
Okay, that is a major screw up, like a serious, serious screw up.
Now, does that mean it's time to get out there and go out partying?
No, it does not mean that.
It does mean that as the data comes in, we are going to have to consider how we get this thing back on the rails.
And that is, it is of priority.
Distress debt balloons to near $1 trillion near the 2008 peak.
According to Bloomberg, the amount of distress debt in the United States has quadrupled in less than a week, reaching levels not seen since 2008, as the collapse of oil prices and the fallout from coronavirus shutters entire industries across the globe.
The total is probably even higher.
The calculation does not include the debt of small to medium-sized companies whose loans trade rarely, if at all.
This has caused the worst sell-off since the global financial crisis and deepened stress in credit markets.
Okay, so obviously all of this is a huge problem.
Steve Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, says that the United States is going to take stakes in airlines in exchange for grants.
That in order to bail out the airlines, basically, they are going to take a government share of the airlines.
So it looks a lot like the auto bailout of 2008.
But the Senate has now approved the largest spending package in the history of the United States.
The Senate bill has now been approved 96 to nothing.
It sits with Nancy Pelosi now, who has been holding it up because she's awful in every possible way.
And this thing, like, I don't know what her leverage is.
Every single Democrat voted in favor of this bill.
Steny Hoyer says that the House will consider the stimulus bill as of Friday.
I can't imagine that it will be held up anymore.
It should be passed before the weekend.
So what exactly is in this thing?
According to the Wall Street Journal, $250 billion to make unemployment insurance available to more categories of workers and to extend the duration of benefits to 39 weeks from 26 weeks, typical in most states.
It would also provide an extra $600 a week for four months.
$301 billion in direct payments to households.
$349 billion in loans to small businesses with the amount spent on payroll, rent, or utilities converting into grants that don't have to be repaid.
$500 billion for loans, loan guarantees, or other aid to businesses, states, and municipalities, including the possibility that the government will take direct equity stakes into stressed companies.
That, by the way, companies are going to reject this.
Companies are just going to not do it.
Boeing already said, if you try to take a stake in us, we just won't take the loan.
And so the government absolutely caved, and the Congress just created an exception for Boeing.
They said they were a national security institution.
$32 billion in grants to cover wages at passenger air carriers, cargo air carriers, contractors, $150 billion in direct aid to states, $221 billion in tax benefits for businesses, $340 billion in supplemental spending.
By the way, all sorts of money for like public transit?
Which I don't know why that's necessary.
Also, just a bunch of pork is in there.
The Kennedy Center got tens of millions of dollars.
The National Endowment for the Arts got tens of millions of dollars.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting got tens of millions of dollars.
Listen, on any normal level, this bill's a bunch of crap.
On any normal level, it's a bad bill.
Given the fact that the alternative is either a pork-laden bleep show or nothing, and this is going to allow businesses to continue to operate for the next three months, okay.
But here is the problem.
And Lindsey Graham makes this point, right?
Senator from South Carolina.
He had held this up last night because one of the provisions of the bill that needed to be clarified is it seemed from the bill You would actually get more money from being on unemployment insurance than from being employed, which would create an incentive for employers to throw people out of work and throw them to the unemployment lines.
I mean, that was in the bill.
And so a few senators, Ben Sasse among them, several senators, Lindsey Graham, they said, we need to get that corrected.
They did get that corrected.
And so the bill passed.
Lindsey Graham said, listen, I don't love everything in this bill, but we need to do something.
So here is Graham saying, I can tolerate some bad to do some good here because we have no choice.
There's a lot of good in this bill.
I'm going to vote for it.
There are medical supplies that nurses and doctors and hospitals need.
Mnuchin's done a good job, very much, trying to keep the Democrats from putting their Green New Deal into the bill.
But here's what we've done.
In the name of doing good, we're going to make it hard for the next four months for employers to find workers, and we're going to incentivize people to leave the workforce, because the first time in my lifetime, America will pay you more not to work than work.
I can tolerate some bad to do some good.
I've made deals.
I know what it's like to negotiate with the other side.
But really, do we need to be giving PBS more money now when people are dying?
Of course, none of that is necessary.
We shouldn't have to do any of this stuff.
But here's the point.
This is not going to stop.
Now is when the real political battle begins.
Right now you've got unanimous support to do something to shore up the economy because the government has forcibly driven a car through your living room.
But there's an entire side of the political aisle that not only wants to make a lot of this crap permanent, but wants to expand on this crap.
And you can see this break out into the open over specifically the provision that Graham is talking about.
There was a provision in the bill that basically suggested that you should get $600 plus whatever salary you were making at your company.
In order to be unemployed.
And Graham was like, uh, no, that doesn't make any sense.
If you're trying to maintain jobs, then what you don't do is pay people more to stay out of work than to stay in work.
That doesn't make any sense.
Enough people are going to be fired already without incentivizing people to be thrown off the payroll.
Instead, you have Nancy Pelosi out there saying, no, no, no, we're talking about $600.
What do you care?
What do you care?
We're spending a lot of money anyway.
Why not incentivize people to be thrown out of work?
This from the same lady who just a few years ago was suggesting openly that we need to make a national health insurance system something akin to a national health insurance system so that people don't have job lock, right?
So that they are not stuck in their jobs in order to gain health insurance.
So Nancy Pelosi has long been on board with the idea of paying people to be unemployed.
Here's Nancy Pelosi talking about all of this.
The fact is, is that there is an imbalance in our country in income and therefore the unemployment benefits.
But Lisa described it very well.
It's complicated.
It's complicated to make it calibrate for every state.
So just call it $600 around the country.
At a time when the fact is that we are a consumer economy and that we really need people to put money in people's pockets so they can then spend, inject demand into the economy, grow the economy, and that's a good thing.
Okay, first of all, everything she's saying there is crap about how this economy is going to recover.
It's not going to recover because you just put money in people's pockets.
You think anyone right now is spending extra money?
You think people are going out and buying?
They're not.
Where are they going to shop?
Okay, it's not a real thing until the coronavirus thing is solved.
I mean, this is basically along the same, it's the democratic version of, what if we gave a tax cut to everybody and then they went and spent the money?
Like, I'm all in favor of tax cuts, but that ain't going to inject demand into this economy.
That is not a thing that's going to happen right now.
There is no demand because nothing's open because the government shut everything down.
Then you had Bernie Sanders doing the same routine.
Bernie talking about how, how could Republicans be so upset about expanding unemployment benefits beyond what they wanted originally?
It's a very good thing!
We should have permanent unemployment!
Okay, first of all, good rule of thumb.
If Bernie's for it, it's a bunch of garbage.
Second thing.
The point here is not that Republicans weren't expanding unemployment.
It was their proposal to do so over the weekend.
The point is, how long is that going to last and incentivize people to stay out of the workforce artificially on the basis of debt that we cannot even float at this point because no other country has the capacity to buy our debt?
But here's Bernie Sanders grandstanding and being rewarded for it on Twitter.
Twitter, by the way, is the dumbest place on earth.
I've spent less and less time on Twitter over time.
There is a reason for that.
It is because it is a repository of idiocy and malice and just ridiculous garbage.
Anyway, here is Bernie Sanders, who again was trending on Twitter.
Thank you, Bernie, for suggesting that people are greedy for not trying to float unemployment benefits seven months out at the employment wages that they are earning right now.
Now I find that some of my Republican colleagues are very distressed.
They're very upset that somebody who's making 10, 12 bucks an hour might end up with a paycheck for four months.
More than they received last week.
Oh, my God!
The universe is collapsing.
Imagine that.
Somebody who's making 12 bucks an hour now, like the rest of us, faces an unprecedented economic crisis with the 600 bucks on top of their normal, their regular unemployment check.
Might be making a few bucks more for four months.
Oh my word!
Will the universe survive?
Okay, no.
The point here is that when you incentivize millions of people to stay out of the workforce after the crisis.
We're talking about after the crisis.
And this has been my point here.
My point is not that we shouldn't have done something.
We should have done something.
My point is, what you do should be geared towards solving the crisis.
Okay?
It should not... Take the hydroxychloroquine for the...
For the prescribed coronavirus.
Take the amount.
Don't drink the fish tank cleaner.
Bernie wants you to drink the fish tank cleaner economically.
Okay, the Democrats want to drink the fish tank cleaner economically.
This is what they want.
They want never-ending spending.
They're trying to make this all permanent.
I'm going to get into more of this in just one second.
I'm going to demonstrate to you that now this has become political.
It started off as apolitical.
It should remain apolitical.
It is no longer apolitical, nor will it be apolitical in the upcoming weeks as the economy remains closed.
And that's ugly.
We need to be talking about how we Get enough ICU beds, enough ventilators, enough resources, mobilize so we can all go back to work as soon as possible.
Instead, we're going to get debates over a fourth round of stimulus, a fifth round of stimulus, based on money that doesn't exist, based on debt that we cannot sell, based on economies around the world that are not working.
We'll get into more of this in just one second.
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Okay, this is the largest spending bill in the history of the United States.
And Democrat after Democrat after Democrat after Democrat is saying, we need more.
We need more.
Okay, now listen, if you can make the case for why the more is going to shore up the businesses that are going to die, love to hear it.
But if this is just you prioritizing your garbage priorities that you couldn't get past in a normal time, and you're doing it under cover of night in order to take advantage of a crisis, that's you being a crap person.
It's a bad crisis, and so your immediate response is, but what if we could get a Green New Deal?
What if we could do that?
And it's a universal call from the Democrats.
Shocker, shocker, shocker.
Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator from New York, says we need to spend more.
We literally just spent $2 trillion.
The entire normal budget of the United States in a year, in which we'll run a $1 trillion deficit, is $4 trillion.
We just took that and multiplied it by half, added it to the budget, For basically a two to three month period, because that's what we're talking about here.
We all hope and pray.
And in all likelihood, it will be two to three months.
We had on yesterday, Dr. Marty McCary from Johns Hopkins University.
He says this thing is going to wane by May.
Okay, so for two to three months, we're talking about this?
Fine.
Okay, but you're talking about making it permanent.
We need to spend more and more and more and more.
Why it's almost as though you're attempting to confirm your political priors by referring to a crisis that should be temporary and that we should be looking to get out of, not to exacerbate.
Here's Christian Gillibrand.
We need to spend more.
This bill is very helpful, but it's just the first step.
This is going to be a very long-term crisis.
It's going to take months and months to get out of it.
And frankly, I don't think our economy is going to return to where it was for a long time.
More than months, perhaps years.
And so the truth is our job is to Duke triage.
Right now we needed to get real dollars into the hands of real people.
This is not intended to make all states whole.
It couldn't possibly do that.
But it's intended to get us through the next four weeks and hopefully the next four months in terms of the coverage of employees.
The easiest thing to do as a politician, by the way, is to shout that you need more money.
Always to shout that you need more money.
The question is, how do you draw the balance between what we actually need right now and running up that credit card forever?
Because guess what?
You want to depress the economy?
You want to ensure that we actually can't do any of the things that we need to do as an economy?
You want to raise taxes dramatically?
Because here's the reality.
At a certain point here, we're going to have to pay back these bonds.
At a certain point here, you're going to have to raise taxes in order to pay for this stuff and sink the economy in the process.
So, you are taking a short-term hit right now, but turning it into a long-term hit, a permanent hit, forever.
Two trillion dollars you're spending right now, and you're watching Democrats immediately claim that they need to spend like 30 trillion bucks because of the two trillion, right?
Joe Biden, who's barely a sentient human being at this point, I'm not sure that he's alive.
Joe Biden, yesterday, He said, well, in the next round of negotiations, maybe there'll be a Green New Deal in the next round, like another Green New Deal.
Okay.
Alexander Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal was set to cost, what was it?
It was something like $90 trillion over the course of the next 30 years or something.
It was something insane.
It's something completely crazy.
And Joe Biden's like, well, maybe we'll do a Green New Deal.
Really?
Is everybody begging for solar panels right now?
Last I checked, everybody just wants to go back to work.
Everybody just wants to be healthy and go back to work.
Those would be the two priorities.
And Joe Biden's like, what if we could have a windmill?
Like a windmill.
You know, like when I was a boy back in the 1930s, you know, I used to have one of those little, you know, like not a windmill, but like one of those things you blow on it, it spins, it spins like, it was really pretty, like a kaleidoscope.
Go Joe Biden.
We're going to have an opportunity, I believe, in the next round here to use my Green Deal to be able to generate both economic growth consistent with the kind of infusion of monies we need into the system to keep it going.
One of the ways to make sure these jobs are available that may get lost or hurt in the meantime is to provide the kind of jobs that are prevailing wages where people are making $45, $50 an hour plus benefits by building new infrastructure.
Remember that time that the Obama administration tried this with shovel-ready jobs and then created zero jobs?
Remember that?
Remember that time they tried this with green jobs?
Remember they had a green jobs czar named Van Jones, and remember they created no jobs?
Van Jones admitted they could not actually peg down one green new job that had been created.
Remember that?
So now Joe Biden's doing the same thing on the back of this.
But Joe Biden isn't done.
He's just, uh, yeah, I wanna, yeah, maybe we'll do like, um, you know what I'm saying?
You know what I'm saying?
You know what To help the folks this bill leaves out, including young people.
This bill doesn't include student loan forgiveness, which would go a long way to providing immediate relief for those who need it the most.
I support forgiving at least $10,000 in student loan debt per person now.
It doesn't include the cost-free treatment for the COVID-19 Whatever the costs are related to that, it should be cost-free.
Okay, guys, when I say this is going to turn into a political battle, this is what I mean.
And this is what I've said before.
You know, there are a lot of things that I'm not fond of about President Trump.
One thing I'm fond of is the man does not want to destroy the American economy on the basis of a crisis.
If the Democrat were president right now, they'd be nationalizing everything in sight.
They already would have nationalized the health supply industry.
They already would have been pushing for a Green New Deal.
They've been pushing for permanent federal jobs.
That's what they're doing over at Salon.com, by the way.
Or Slate, rather.
There's an entire piece at Slate called, The Senate Coronavirus Bill Is Not Going To Be Enough by Daniel Carpenter.
What is he suggesting?
Well, aside from hiring up some federal workers for the CDC and the FDA, which is totally fine, and hiring up some new people at the unemployment office, he wants there to be permanent hiring in the transport infrastructure industry.
What the hell does that have to do with anything?
He wants permanent hiring in the alternative energy infrastructure department.
He says planning and rollout for a more expansive grid of electric cars, solar panels, and wind farms necessitates hiring workers.
What the hell does that have to do with coronavirus?
What are you even talking about?
He says, if the economic and health reasons for stimulus through public sector hiring are not enough, consider two other benefits of government hiring.
First, an infrastructure plan that relies largely or entirely on contractors will likely exacerbate the social and economic inequality that have torn our country apart.
Government jobs provide solid benefits.
Oh, so it's like you're... Why, it's almost as though you're looking for a government jobs program like Bernie Sanders wanted in the first place, and you're using a crisis in order to try and guarantee that.
Listen, you got all of us on board because we had to.
Some of us are not super happy about a $2 trillion spending plan.
We wonder whether that $2 trillion is actually what is fully necessary, or whether $1.5 trillion would have done it, or whether there should have been zero interest loans rather than grants, or whether they should have been funneled through the banks that were already guaranteeing the loans and you up unemployment insurance on the other side for the people who legit are thrown out of jobs.
Maybe some of us think there was a better way to do this deal, but knowing what was going on, the deal had to be done.
Fine.
And now your immediate claim is that we have not done enough and that we need to spend more money?
You need to spend more money?
Why, it's almost as though this is a political agenda-driven, nonsensical thing that you guys are pushing here.
It has nothing to do with reality.
Almost as though.
Almost as though.
Is it time for some things I like and some things that I hate?
Let's do some things I like and some things that I hate.
So, you know what?
We will skip things that I like today.
Let's do a thing I hate instead.
So the intrepid reporter Mark Fisher, Washington Post senior editor, the author of Trump Revealed, he has a tweet today.
Here's the tweet.
Scott McMillan, a 56-year-old lawyer, tweeted that it's more vital to revive the economy than to save people who are not productive, like the elderly and infirm.
So I called his parents.
Okay, so he's a lawyer.
He expressed a public policy position that is really unpopular, and in my opinion, wrong.
And you called his mommy?
Like this is absolute journalism of highest quality.
A rando said a thing you don't like so you called his mommy as a reporter for the Washington Post.
Wow, our journalistics, I trust them so much.
I trust those UK experts who revised their initial estimate down from 510,000 deaths to 20,000 deaths over the course of one week.
And their estimate for coronavirus has spread from 12 months to two weeks.
I'm like, the peak is going to happen.
I trust all experts.
I trust them so much.
I trust them so much.
And I trust our journalistic experts to bring us nothing but truth.
I trust democracy dies in darkness, guys.
This is what the article says.
He urged saving the economy over protecting those who are, quote, not productive from the coronavirus.
Then he faced America's wrath.
Scott McMillan had had it with being cooped up, with the whole country being closed, with the collapsing market and the isolation, the constant worry, the politicians who didn't take coronavirus seriously when they could have.
On Sunday night, McMillan, a 56-year-old lawyer in La Mesa, California, near San Diego, saw President Trump's tweet about how we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.
The lawyer took to Twitter to add his own two cents.
He tweeted, the fundamental problem is whether we're going to tank the entire economy to save 2.5% of the population, which is one, generally expensive to maintain and two, not productive.
Okay, well that is a very poor way of putting this thing because number one, we don't want any of those old people to die.
And number two, he's expressing basically that you have to take everything into consideration but in a very gauche way.
I mean, that would be the best way to describe what he is doing.
He's saying that obviously every public policy is balanced.
It's the same thing that happened with the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick.
People are expressing the need to balance priorities in the dumbest possible way.
But the overall point, which is that obviously public policy takes into account both the risk to human life and the risk to economics, which, again, is real life for millions and millions of people who are waking up without a job today.
Right?
That is a thing that we have to take into account.
Now, he puts that in a gauche way, and so the Washington Post called his mommy.
Seriously.
People called him a liberal and a white right-wing nut, even a Nazi.
They threatened his livelihood, his family, his home.
Polite people told him about their elderly parents who teach their grandchildren Latin and music and produce more happiness in their golden years than most working people do in their entire careers.
The mean people who are not shy on Twitter invoked a full array of lawyer jokes, soiling green in the Holocaust to convey just how awful McMillan was for implying that old or infirm people should be put aside to allow America to get back to work.
MacMillan told the Washington Post, I'm not a cold-hearted monster.
Nature does this every so often.
It wipes out a bunch of us.
MacMillan was not the first person to express the idea.
It's more important for the country to get back to work than it is to do everything possible to protect the elderly and the infirm.
In the anxious political and personal struggle between doing whatever it takes to avoid a wicked, sometimes lethal virus, and doing what is needed to revive a suddenly dormant economy, MacMillan's tweet became a lightning rod.
So, Washington Post immediately jumped into the story.
And instead of saying, this is a random dude on Twitter who said a dumb thing, instead, the Washington Post decided, you know what would be great?
We will call his mommy.
We'll call his mommy!
As the blow black grew fierce, the lawyer took down his own tweet, took down his website, screened his calls.
He was miserable.
He took his chloroquine, the anti-malaria drug Trump kept talking up, hoping it might protect him against the virus, though there is no evidence it will.
It makes him feel like crap.
He lowered his dose but keeps taking it because he said, maybe it does work.
Okay, so this guy's kind of nutty anyway, right?
He doesn't have coronavirus and he's taking chloroquine.
And so you picked on a guy who seems like he is semi-nutty and you called his parents.
He remained unapologetic on Twitter.
He wrote that his approach, whether you like it or not, is the analysis that will be performed by our political leaders and our medical personnel.
Look at Italy.
He said, I don't want to take out the old people.
I don't want the kids coming up today to be akin to the depression kids.
The longer this drags on without people working, the worse it's going to be.
We can't allow our society to collapse over this.
So here is what the Washington Post did in their quest for democracy, not dying in darkness.
Scott's father, Jim McMillan, is alive.
He's 78.
Scott's mother, Gloria, is 75.
They're well.
They are, by Scott's measure, not productive.
Jim's a retired lawyer.
Gloria's a retired high school English teacher.
They've been especially not productive since February 23rd, which is the last time they left their house in San Diego when they went to the LA Opera to watch a performance of Euridice.
Well, the last time, except for 10 days ago, when Jim said he was going to the Home Depot to get a light switch to replace the one that went on the fritz.
He said he went out, not bothering with gloves or mask, and then he stopped by Walmart to look at canned goods.
He bought some coolant, and his wife yelled at him.
Since the Walmart trip, they've continued their not-productive life at home.
Their main activity is watching news, says Gloria.
Jim and Gloria like to argue about the virus, the president, pretty much anything they argue about, whether they argue it about who wins.
They agree with their son, Scott, that Trump dallyed too long and failed to act.
They agree with their son, Scott, the president is right to push now to restart the economy.
And they agree with Scott that businesses should reopen, even if it means putting old folks and people with underlying illnesses and other non-productive types into quarantine for an extended period.
So, I guess that they called his parents and his parents were like, okay.
How the hell is that a story?
Okay, so not only is it not a story what the guy said on Twitter, it is also not a story when you call his mommy and daddy.
And it is super not a story when they're like, yeah, fine, whatever.
That's called not a story.
The Washington Post devoted several thousand words to this.
Several thousand words to this nonsense.
Well done, Washington Post.
Our journalistic betters, keeping us informed every single day.
Incredible.
Alrighty, we'll be back here later today with two additional hours of content, hopefully some more good news for you.
Otherwise, we'll be back here tomorrow.
Make sure to check out our all-access live by going to dailywire.com.
Andrew Klavan's on tonight, hanging out with you.
I'll be back a little bit later this week, I think tomorrow, hanging out with you.
So, go join up at dailywire.com, become part of our community.
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