BUSTED

I got a cow that went dry

and a hen that won't lay.

A big stack of bills that gets bigger each day,

The county's gonna haul my belongings away

Cause I'm busted.

Ray Charles

Yes, folks, we are in a world of hurt. We can't go to work the way we used to or we stand a good chance of getting sick and, after that, a fair chance of dying. That is really not a big deal to a lot of folks especially those who aren't going to have to work that assembly line. They are far more interested in the financial end of things and, truthfully, we should be also. But we need not be so troubled that we are willing to give up our lives and leave our families without any hope going forward. Any government that asks you to do this is a government that has failed in its main purpose and does not have your welfare at heart.

I'm probably not in as bad a shape financially as some of you. We don't have much but what we have is paid for. We survived long enough to qualify for Medicare and Social Security which isn't much but it is more than a lot of people in big houses and driving new SUVs have. I know how to grow a garden and have done so for at least half my lifetime now but there is no way that today's world will allow you to subsist on that alone. But if you are a person who cares about this country and cares about what kind of future you are leaving your children you should be terrified.

Here is the issue. With very few people working our government is going to experience a sharp drop in revenue. We already spend a third more than we receive for various reasons that do not include people unwilling to work. After the crash of '08 we used about $2 Trillion to bail out the banks and for stimulus. We've spent about $6 Trillion on wars that we needn't have fought and can't win. Now, we are spending Trillions more to try to keep America from turning into Somalia. Where is the money coming from? Well, it's kind of a win/win situation because all we have to do is print up some more money. We can't trade it for gold or silver any longer so it is a financial medium that depends on itself for reliability. The only way it can fail is if enough people begin to see it as a currency that is no longer reliable. Since it is the global standard that means if the dollar goes down so does the world's financial markets. It is faith in the United States and the dollar that keeps the world's financial markets in motion. Can the dollar fail? Who wants to find out?

I want you to consider what would happen if, for some reason, people quit accepting the dollar as payment for goods and debts. I also want you to consider how government gets money to pay for things to be done. For instance, how does Social Security get paid for? How does our military get paid for? Have you ever thought about who gets that money that we spend on our military? What happens if we can't pay for the fuel to keep ships and planes moving? Or to pay our men and women in the Armed Forces. Necessarily we would be required to pull our forces out of service and bring them home. What if we can't pay to have our roads and bridges maintained (which apparently we can't)? I'm sure you don't need me to provide the answers to these questions but think about it.

So, here we are (and the rest of the world also) with a virus threatening to kill or make ill almost half of us. We can't work if we're too sick to work. We can't go around infecting everyone else. That's what the Bubonic Plague did and that set civilization back 400 years and brought on what we refer to as “The Dark Ages.” Pandemics have plagued mankind that we know of as far back as history goes but in the past century we became able to fight them back. Now one has arisen that we don't know how to fight but we do know some things that work to alleviate the symptoms.

What I want you to do is to consider the amount of disruption that this virus, a tiny thing we can't even see, has caused. It has totally disrupted global trade, financial markets, energy production and every other facet of our lives you can think of. What do you think would happen if we jumped the gun to return to our endeavors only to create a larger pandemic than we now have? That is what we did a hundred years ago with the Spanish Flu and the second wave was much larger than the first. Many find that to be an acceptable outcome. Right now we are existing on government debt providing us with the currency that is necessary in today's lives. Can that government sustain that obligation to it's citizens through another wave of infection and death or would we be left to our own devices? Can we maintain medical services or would we be left to die with bodies placed at the front door for pickup as they were in times past? Perhaps the answer to that lies in what is happening in nursing homes.

Those wanting us to return to work are being short-sighted and betray their allegiance to money rather than people. These things have the ability to bring down governments and the next one we get may not be so considerate of it's citizens. We must continue the distancing until we arrive at some way to lessen the effect of the disease or a vaccine to immunize us or we risk losing it all. Yes, it is that desperate.

My Take is that this is bad but there is an enemy in the wings already on the move to hit us again and it has the potential to make Covid 19 look like a walk in the park. We not only need to get back to work, we need to restructure our society so that we will be better prepared when, not if, it comes. Be smart.