It’s been a very long time since a sat down to add something to this blog but, looking at everything going on around me, it was time!
For those who can actually think beyond today, I would hope that we can all realize that every small business that can’t come back from this mishandled and grossly exaggerated virus is one more business that will no longer be providing jobs or contributing to the tax base needed to sustain all the government programs, even the ones those liberals love so much.
And yes, I mean exactly that…mishandled and grossly exaggerated. As a resident of Pennsylvania I’ll keep that comment framed around the actions taking place here.
Our Governor shut down all the rest stops across the state while expecting the trucking industry to continue to deliver goods to our retail outlets. Within days, he had to change those orders, not once but twice because he acted in a manner that did not weigh consequences. Rather than learn from that mistake, he set down more policies that had to be changed because of either ill-advised or simply incompetent calls.
At the same time he established a waiver process that has lacked any sense of transparency and then admitted that his own agencies couldn’t keep up with the sheer number of requests. He then established a cut-off for filing for waivers as though some businesses wouldn’t find a need to file such a waiver at a later date. While doing this, a waiver was given to his family-owned business and when he was caught, the waiver was rescinded but that business continues to operate without a waiver with no fear of prosecution while other business have been threatened if they attempt to do the same.
When is that going to become part of the media narrative on this entire process?
While leaving Home Depot and Lowe’s open, he shut down all the smaller garden centers at a time when we are hearing about potential food shortages making it only possible to do some home gardening while on a statewide lock down through the box stores, not in support of smaller garden shops that could easily have established safe environments for their customers. After all, if it’s okay to crowd the grocery stores where social distancing is next to impossible, wouldn’t it have made more sense to open up other venues to allow for those crowds to be spread out over those venues if this was really about our health and safety.
They opened many of the state-run liquor stores and yet we are told that these decisions are based on determination of essential vs non-essential businesses. We are told that this is supposed to be about making healthy decisions and so we aren’t supposed to question the irony of why I can buy beer and state-run liquor but I can’t go to my local gardening supply center to purchase plants and seeds for my home garden.
They open fishing which is a state controlled recreational program that requires state implemented fees but things like golf are a no-no even though it could be opened and still abide by safe social distancing practices.
Simple question: if I can be safe at Walmart, Giant Foods, or any other still open box store with 100 other people by wearing a mask and gloves, why can’t I be safe wearing a mask and gloves with 5 or 10 other people at my local garden shop, gold course or other smaller family owned business?
I find it somewhat ironic that for decades the more liberal mindset has been out there attacking businesses like McDonald’s and other fast food joints as well as the Walmart’s and other box stores and now those same people are supporting and embracing economic policies that will assure that those business are the last ones standing with the strongest footing when this is all over.
Let’s all understand that 48% of the entire workforce is through the small business network. 44 million jobs account for people who are classified as self-employed.
Some studies are making claims that 1 in 5 small business are not going to survive this shutdown. Lets understand that just 1 in 5 means a minimum of 20% of the revenues generated by those small businesses disappears from the overall economy.
This will dramatically impact the funding for all those so-called social “safety nets” making it all the more difficult to sustain the financial needs for those programs. It will create economic instabilities into the future, and before I get accused of caring more about the economy than people’s health, these actions will result in even more long-term health issues.
As someone who has actively been involved in the property tax issue and has spent countless hours studying economic impact related to this tax, every small business that can’t re-open when this is over translates into thousands of dollars that will have to be shifted to homes and other businesses just to maintain the current cost of funding education through the property tax. In an already unsustainable tax system, we’re making that problem worse. We’ll be adding to the problems of over-crowding in rental situations as property taxation will have to dramatically increase as well as adding to the problems of blight and abandoned properties which will only serve to generate even more health-related issues.
These long-term impacts will have far reaching consequences that are not just economic issues but issues connected to overall health and well-being of people. Economic health and personal health are connected no matter how many times people try to tell you otherwise and if you think that once this is over, turning the economy back on is like flipping a light switch, you couldn’t be more wrong. We should have been looking at that as well.
As I write this, we are now seeing individual counties coming out and challenging the numbers coming out of the Department of Health as well as the so-called “experts” admitting they are adding people who haven’t been tested to total numbers and yet so many people are accepting these Covid-19 numbers as hard established fact when that’s simply not true.
Those manipulated numbers then become the justification for extending shut-downs, adding new restrictions all while lacking the transparency we need in such uncertain times.
I’ve been called a science denier from the onset of this because I dared to question what I was being told. In spite of the many times when those experts have been proven to be wrong; we’re just supposed to forget the claims of 2.2 million deaths; we’re to forget the prophecies of people dying in the streets because there wouldn’t be enough hospital beds; and now we’re just supposed to ignore that local coroner numbers are not matching the “official” numbers from the state. We can all go on and add to these expert “fallacies”
The fact is that the economic health of the people is connected to our overall health and well-being. Those who refuse to admit that are the real science deniers.
For a very long time we’ve been hearing the whole “the science is settled” debate when nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that within the actual scientific community, there has been and there always will be dissenting views and opinions and both sides claim to have statistical data to back up their claims.
The Covid-19 issue is the same. The division of something as simple as the issues of safety related to wearing some form of mask reveals that there has been a divided front on that science. While we can and we should have that debate what can no longer be debated is that the people who we were expected to trust, the people who had the spotlight shone on them during this crisis, have been wrong over and over again.
While there have been cases of hospitals being overwhelmed, the vast majorities of hospitals are not. Reports being released that in some cases, hospital workers are being furloughed and in other cases some are opening their doors to elective surgery, in spite of such bans being in place. And yet, these stats are being largely ignored because it doesn’t fit a narrative, an agenda. So go ahead and say it…”Jim, that’s sounds conspiratorial and paranoid!”
I shared two videos on facebook, both of which were blocked and declared as being false by the powers that be. Both well well-researched with commentary by other noted people within the respective fields of expertise. Even though the information in those videos is now being confirmed by other news and media outlets, facebook rejected those videos claiming they were both false. Turns out they weren’t, it was facebook that was wrong. That sort of thing only contributes to the sense of this whole thing being more agenda driven than a willingness to get to actually the truth.
How are we to respond when the experts made these wild predictions and now some are saying this won’t be any worse than the average flu season? While every death is tragic, we didn’t shut down the economy during previous flu seasons and the reason for that is simply because the media and the government didn’t tell people they were supposed to be scared.
I can go on but this is already longer than the average person cares to read, if it will be read at all, but I needed to vent.