Let us say half those people are reemployed in a month, and half will be out of work for the next year. Let’s round it down to 12 million who will be out of work for the next year.
In Trump’s economy prior to all this nonsense, there were about 164 million people participating in the labor force. This means, on this assumption, that we will see a 7% increase in unemployment over the next year.
Some years ago an economic analyst calculated that for every 1% increase in unemployment, 40,000 Americans die. They die from a variety of causes. There is less money for medical care from all sources, there is vastly more stress, vastly more divorce, vastly more drug and alcohol abuse, and significant increases in suicide rates. Blended, the overall mortality rate goes up.
Within the last month someone reached out to that researcher and asked if those numbers still hold. He said that the Stimulus money and various small business grants are likely making things much better than when he first ran the numbers.
So let’s cut the number to 20,000. 7% times 20,000 equals 140,000 excess deaths over the next year. That is more than TWICE the number that have died so far, and the death rate and hospitalizations are declining nationally.
No one who has put the least bit of thought into this can possibly conclude that the labor lockout is saving lives, or that the path of compassion is pretending otherwise.
And please add onto this plain and simple misery. The people that die are, by and large, elderly and at the end of their lives. The people who will die from the economic decline will be working age people, and most of them will in effect die of stress and anxiety. They will die slowly, sadly, and with no fanfare.
This whole thing is a monstrous atrocity, and I really hope it comes to be viewed as such soon, and by most of the people in this and every other country which enacted such a benighted policy.
I don’t dispute this is a really bad flu year, in effect. But nobody even noticed when 80,000 mostly elderly Americans died of the flu just a few years ago.
And I DO dispute, categorically, that a labor lockout was or is the correct policy.