Those who have nothing to lose have no reason not to protect their vanity by saying “we just need to do more, and by we I mean you. Somebody has to carry the whip.”
The failure of this policy will not be fully obvious until it ends, and we are able to observe how many businesses remain shuttered. But it should be said that nobody who owns a business that fails can claim unemployment. Neither can Independent Contractors, which is how a great many sales jobs are structured. 1099 people. So the actual toll will not be reflected in unemployment claims. It will only be seen when one counts the For Sale signs on the doors of formerly prosperous, or at least stable, businesses.
But my personal guess, and this is of course necessarily a SWAG, is that AT LEAST 2 people will die for every life which our rulers can plausibly say was saved with their policies. And those numbers get daily and weekly worse the longer this lasts.
I say again: BEFORE this debacle, 7 out of 10 Americans did not have $1,000 in savings. If you figure that number, too, was on a curve, that means a great many had NOTHING. Day to day. Broke now. Dealing drugs or doing tricks to put food in the table.
And THAT number, in turn, is the result of our unsound currency. Our national savings rate started plummeting some time around or after the inflation of the 1970’s. If money is not stable, then hiding it away makes a lot less sense than spending it immediately. Add to this easy credit, and Americans fell hook, line and sinker for the idea that no nest egg was needed, and YOLO.