The Senate unanimously passes a massive government spending plan, and 3.3 million Americans are now out of work. Meanwhile, coronavirus begins to hit New York City hospitals. Ben Shapiro on the impact of the government shutdown on the economy and how to get back to a semblance of normalcy. The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. You have a right to privacy, so protect it at Express VPN. Now more than ever, check out ExpressVPN on the App Store or Google Play. If you like the show, please give a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and I'll read out your comments and thoughts on the next episode. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - Senate passes the largest spending bill in the history of the U.S. 4:30:30 - Why the shutdown is bad for the economy 6:30- What will happen next? 7:00- What is the plan for reopening the economy? 8:15 - How can we get back on track? 9:40 - What are the implications of the shutdown? 10:00 11:15- Is the shutdown a good or bad thing? 12:40- What are we going to do now? 13:40 15:30 16:20 - What will we learn from this? 17:15 18:20 19:30 Is it possible? 21:50 22:30 + 17:30) Is there a lesson from this ? 26:40 + 3:30? 27:40) - Is it a good thing? #1 #3 + 3 + 4 + 4? #5 And so on & so on (and so much more? ) (And so on) (and a full list... ) #1) #1 & #2 + And so much The full quote from Ben Shapiro's post on this quote from the quote of the quote from The Benny Shapiro clip from The Daily Mail ... Parse it's a quote from ...and so on ... # Thank you, Ben Shapiro is a real thing ... ) & so much so ... And more and so on... And the rest... )
00:00:00.000The 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.
00:00:53.000The number shatters the Great Recession peak of 665,000 in March 2009 and the all-time mark of 695,000 in October 1982.
00:00:57.000And the all-time mark of 695,000 in October 1982, the previous week, was 282,000.
00:01:03.000So we shot up 3 million lost jobs in one week.
00:01:08.000So 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.
00:01:15.000No doubt most of those people are hourly workers, or blue collar workers, or people who are not making $150,000 a year.
00:01:22.000Consensus 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.
00:01:31.000The surge comes amid a crippling slowdown brought on by the coronavirus crisis.
00:01:35.000Well, to be fair, that is not brought on just by consumer activity.
00:01:38.000That is brought on by state and federal governments and international governments everywhere telling people that they must stay in their homes.
00:01:44.000It 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.
00:01:52.000Turns out that really cuts down on the capacity of the economy to keep moving.
00:01:56.000The 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.
00:02:05.000The major stock indices did open higher, wiping out sharp earlier losses, and that is because Everybody sort of expected this was coming.
00:02:12.000Everybody 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.
00:02:20.000That 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.
00:02:31.000One of the things that we're going to have to look at is the international scene.
00:02:34.000We'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.
00:02:40.000What is the plan for reopening the economy?
00:02:42.000What is the plan for getting back to some semblance of normalcy?
00:02:46.000Was it the right move to shut down the schools?
00:02:47.000Was it the right move to shut down all businesses?
00:02:51.000Now, based on available information, the answer seems to be yes, because you don't want to turn into Italy.
00:02:56.000But what if it turns out that Italy is the outlier and, for example, the UK is much more close to the norm?
00:03:01.000What if it turns out that South Korea is a little closer to the norm and Spain is closer to the outlier?
00:03:05.000We don't know the answers to these questions.
00:03:07.000So 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.
00:03:15.000That 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.
00:03:22.000It is also possible to say that maybe we should have taken the Swedish approach.
00:03:25.000Sweden didn't shut down its economy nearly at all.
00:03:27.000We're gonna get to this in just one second.
00:03:28.000First, let's talk about how HR issues can kill you no matter whether your business is up or down.
00:03:34.000The last thing you need is an HR issue.
00:03:36.000And HR has become even more of a nightmare now with the thickets of legislation and regulations that have now been passed regarding what you can and cannot do with your employees.
00:03:43.000When you are running a business, HR issues can cost you a ton of money.
00:03:47.000And right now, you don't have the money lying around to go hire an HR specialist at $75,000, $100,000 a year.
00:03:52.000If you're running a business, what you need is an HR manager that is dedicated to you, but at a very, very low cost.
00:04:46.000Okay, so where do we stand right now domestically and internationally?
00:04:51.000Well, domestically, we are all worried we're about to become Italy.
00:04:53.000Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti warned of mass death and condemned false hope, presumably that false hope coming from President Trump, on Wednesday.
00:05:00.000He told LA residents that they will be confined to their homes until at least May.
00:05:05.000Okay, it is now, last I checked, March 26th.
00:05:07.000So that means another month of people being confined to their homes.
00:05:11.000Garcetti said, I think this is at least two months.
00:05:15.000Garcetti 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.
00:05:23.000He says, I can't say that strongly enough.
00:05:25.000He says, giving people false hope will crush their spirits, will kill more people.
00:05:29.000Because 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.
00:05:36.000He says this will not kill most of us, it will kill a lot more people than we're used to dying around us.
00:05:40.000Garcetti 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.
00:05:48.000As of noon on Tuesday, LA County public health officials said that there were 662 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 11 confirmed deaths.
00:05:55.000The actual numbers are no doubt higher, with officials only recently beginning to roll out testing.
00:05:59.000Those 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.
00:06:12.000Now, 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.
00:06:33.000With 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.
00:06:41.000If the raw number is very large, even if the rate is very small, the ICUs are not based on percentages.
00:06:46.000The ICUs are based on the raw number of beds available.
00:06:49.000The ventilators are based on the raw number of ventilators available.
00:06:52.000Garcetti 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.
00:07:02.000Will we have hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands?
00:07:05.000Okay, 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.
00:07:16.000Obviously, we're going to see hospitals that are crushed under the weight of this thing.
00:07:20.000We're obviously going to see overcrowding.
00:07:21.000So far, the ICUs have not been overcrowded.
00:07:24.000What I mean by that is that they will be.
00:07:25.000I 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.
00:07:30.000There'll be more people who need ventilators than ventilators available, although there's some new breakthroughs in terms of ventilator technology.
00:07:36.000that 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.
00:07:46.000But 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.
00:07:54.000Okay, not enough morgue space is a bad thing, but you can make morgue space pretty easily.
00:07:57.000And everybody sort of acknowledges that that just requires a federal go ahead.
00:08:00.000The morgue space is not the big issue here, because those people, Not to be coarse about this, but those people are already dead.
00:08:06.000I mean, what we really need are the resources to keep the people who are alive, alive.
00:08:09.000And so the question is, when do we hit that point?
00:08:11.000We were already hearing that by Tuesday, the system was going to be overwhelmed.
00:08:16.000He said that by earlier this week, the system was already going to be overwhelmed.
00:08:19.000That doesn't mean the system won't be overwhelmed.
00:08:21.000It 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?
00:08:30.000And Andrew Cuomo is even admitting as much, right?
00:08:33.000Andrew 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?
00:08:41.000Here's Andrew Cuomo suggesting that the rate of increase in New York City has been decreased fairly dramatically.
00:08:47.000Westchester, we have dramatically slowed what was an exponential increase.
00:08:55.000So again, on the good news side, can you slow the rate of infection?
00:09:05.000That was the hottest cluster in the United States of America.
00:09:10.000We closed the schools, we closed gatherings, we brought in testing, and we have dramatically slowed the increase.
00:09:20.000Okay, 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.
00:09:25.000You have to assume tons and tons of people will be or already have been infected with coronavirus.
00:09:30.000The real question is, over what period of time and do we have the medical resources necessary to deal with those people?
00:09:35.000Here'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.
00:09:59.000And our job is to make sure that we save every single New Yorker we can.
00:10:05.000Okay, 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.
00:10:12.000What'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?
00:10:19.000How wrong are the models, or how right are the models?
00:10:21.000In 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.
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00:12:28.000So 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.
00:12:37.000Okay, first of all, let's just point out, lots of people die at hospitals.
00:12:40.000Lots and lots of people die at hospitals.
00:12:41.000That does not mean a surge didn't happen at this hospital.
00:12:44.000It does mean that 13 deaths in a day at a hospital is actually not a supremely large number.
00:12:48.000Where 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.
00:13:12.000Elmhurst 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.
00:13:20.000And this is what you would expect, right?
00:13:21.000Outlying 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.
00:13:31.000Italy 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.
00:13:40.000This is why if you go to Southern Italy, the death rates from coronavirus are nowhere near the death rates from coronavirus in Northern Italy.
00:13:48.000Presumably tons of people are still getting coronavirus in Southern Italy and in Rome.
00:13:51.000Well, perhaps the reason is because the medical system in Northern Italy was not prepared for this and they could not shift resources fast enough.
00:13:58.000Also 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.
00:14:08.000In 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%.
00:14:18.000Which means that infections of the elderly are going to be less prevalent in places like the UK, Germany, the US, Sweden, France.
00:14:26.000The 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.
00:14:33.000Meanwhile, the New York Times continues.
00:14:36.000A refrigerated truck has been stationed outside to hold the bodies of the dead.
00:14:39.000Over the past 24 hours, New York City's public hospital system said in a statement, 13 people at Elmhurst had died.
00:14:44.000It's apocalyptic, said Dr. Bray, 27, a general medicine resident at the hospital.
00:14:50.000Across 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.
00:14:58.000Okay, they're confronting it, but Does that mean that they are overwhelmed yet?
00:15:05.000Cuomo 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.
00:15:13.000He 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.
00:15:20.000Hospitals are under siege, says the New York Times.
00:15:22.000New 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.
00:15:30.000Regardless of whom they serve, few have been spared the impact of the pandemic.
00:15:33.000A flood of sick and fearful New Yorkers has besieged emergency rooms across the city.
00:15:39.000But again, nowhere in this article does it say that the system has yet been overwhelmed.
00:15:48.000All 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.
00:15:57.000But 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.
00:16:05.000Because 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.
00:16:11.000Cuomo said he hoped that officials could quickly add units by dipping into a growing supply of ventilators.
00:16:16.000The federal government is sending a 1,000-bed hospital ship to New York.
00:16:19.000It's not scheduled to arrive until mid-April.
00:16:21.000Officials have begun erecting four 250-bed hospitals at the Javits Convention Center in Mintown, Manhattan.
00:16:27.000Also, officials are discussing converting hotels and arenas into temporary medical centers.
00:16:32.000Now, again, talking about how they are filling up morgues, that's not the end of the world.
00:16:36.000Buried 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.
00:16:44.000So, 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.
00:16:58.000So, again, could be true, but we're buying time right now.
00:17:02.000Now, why does this make me a little bit more optimistic?
00:17:04.000Well, 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.
00:17:15.000So, 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.
00:17:28.000Neil 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.
00:17:36.000He gave evidence today into the UK Parliamentary's Select Committee on Science and Technology.
00:17:40.000He 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.
00:17:50.000UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could in fact be much lower.
00:17:56.000Well, that's only an order of magnitude off from what the Imperial College study originally suggested.
00:18:00.000Now, it is easy to say, OK, that's social distancing.
00:18:03.000But 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.
00:18:18.000And Sweden is not experiencing the same sort of overwhelm that Italy is.
00:18:22.000It turns out that different countries are different.
00:18:24.000By 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.
00:18:34.000This has been happening for about four or five days.
00:18:36.000For the fourth day in a row, the total number of cases in the country was rising at a slower pace than usual.
00:18:43.000This 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.
00:18:53.000Confirmed contagions rose by 6% from Tuesday to reach 57,521 in Italy.
00:18:58.000The total number of recovered patients is already over 9,000 in Italy.
00:19:02.000We're going to get to Sweden in just one second because, again, we need comps.
00:19:18.000There are lots of different variations in the treatment and in the transmission because people associate differently in different countries, right?
00:20:42.000They'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.
00:20:51.000Okay, now, that does not mean this was like the flu.
00:20:53.000Okay, we shut down in a way we never have for the flu.
00:20:55.000And we're gonna get flu-like numbers anyway.
00:20:57.000But it is indicative of the fact that some of the rates, the death rates, that were originally put out there were just not true.
00:21:02.000And 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.
00:21:19.000The Scandinavian nation has been embarking on what one health expert called a huge experiment.
00:21:23.000This is according, again, to the Financial Times.
00:21:26.000Since 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.
00:21:34.000By the way, remember, the UK only went on full lockdown like this week and they're already saying...
00:21:39.000That in order of magnitude, less people are going to die than they predicted in that Imperial College study.
00:21:43.000Schools for children up to the age of 16 remain open.
00:21:47.000Packed commuter trains and buses were reported this week in the capital of Stockholm.
00:21:51.000Sweden stands out at the moment, said Carl Bildt, the former prime minister.
00:21:54.000Swedish authorities have banned gatherings of more than 500 people.
00:21:57.000They closed universities and higher education colleges.
00:21:59.000They advised workers to stay home if possible.
00:22:02.000Authorities 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.
00:22:09.000Local media have been full of stories of thousands of people gathering at Swedish ski resorts, which until Saturday were completely open.
00:22:14.000The virus has been spreading easily in mountain resorts in Austria and Italy as well.
00:22:19.000Johan 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.
00:22:28.000So 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.
00:22:41.000It's all about if you can save one life.
00:22:42.000Which, by the way, is the last refuge of the political scoundrel.
00:22:50.000That's about the deliberate killing of a human being.
00:22:52.000That's not quite the same thing as deciding a public policy risks and rewards.
00:22:56.000Carlson 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.
00:23:11.000Sweden's state epidemiologist, he said the future still looks manageable.
00:23:14.000He 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.
00:23:23.000A number of Swedish health experts disagree.
00:23:25.000It's always easier to say that everything should be shut down and then certain things should remain open.
00:23:28.000So Sweden's going to be a fascinating case study.
00:23:30.000If 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?
00:23:38.000It's another thing to do this preemptively in the UK.
00:23:41.000And then four days later, you're saying, by the way, we do have enough ICU beds and we have enough ventilators.
00:23:45.000I mean, unless they dramatically secretly ramped up ICU beds and ventilators, that means that the original estimates were quite wrong.
00:23:51.000And 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.
00:23:57.000It 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.
00:24:04.000They're kind of crazy based on what we currently know.
00:24:09.000We could see the system begin to be overwhelmed.
00:24:11.000I 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.
00:24:19.000So, I'm giving you a wide variety of data so that you can make the best available judgment about what's happening.
00:24:26.000One 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.
00:24:48.000Because as we get more data in, it looks a little better than we thought it was going to.
00:24:51.000We were bending the curve in New York.
00:24:52.000We're bending the curve in Washington state.
00:24:54.000And that possibility of extreme economic loss is no longer a possibility.
00:24:58.000It is a hard reality with millions of people losing their jobs.
00:25:01.000If 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?
00:25:21.000And 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?
00:25:34.000What 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.
00:25:40.000I thought that was way overblown immediately, but let's say it's not 1.1 million deaths.
00:25:44.000Let'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.
00:25:51.000OK, now that's a horrible, horrible number.
00:25:54.000It also happens to be that you're talking about the loss of millions upon millions of jobs.
00:25:59.000And that does have a pretty significant impact on people's lives.
00:26:02.000You're talking about the complete shutdown of the world economy.
00:26:04.000And to pretend that that is not a counterweight is silly.
00:26:07.000Also, 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.
00:26:19.000I know it's forbidden to talk about this stuff.
00:26:21.000You're not allowed to talk about this stuff.
00:26:23.000Every public policy decision comes down to talking about this stuff.
00:26:28.000I 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.
00:26:35.000Their job is to determine the various costs and benefits of various public policies.
00:26:39.000We 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.
00:26:53.000And 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.
00:27:02.000I'm absolutely not taking human life lightly.
00:27:04.000I'm also not taking anybody's economic livelihood lightly.
00:27:14.000If 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.
00:27:33.000And meanwhile, as I say, Washington State case growth has declined.
00:27:37.000We are seeing the Italian curve being flattened, and fairly dramatically, by the way.
00:27:41.000It's been declining fairly steadily in terms of the rate of growth for days on end, for actually weeks now.
00:27:48.000It's had some up and downs, but the trend line is fairly clear at this point.
00:27:52.000We'll get to more of this in just one second.
00:27:54.000We'll talk about the economic impact, which of course has been absolutely dramatic on American society.
00:27:59.000As I say, the certainty of economic loss is very real now.
00:28:01.000Now the possibility of loss of American life is still uncertain.
00:28:05.000We don't know what the percentages are, and no one apparently in the public health world is being honest about their assessments.
00:28:11.000They 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.
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00:29:43.000We don't know what the numbers are going to be for number of deaths versus number of cases.
00:29:46.000We 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.
00:29:55.000And if that number declines further in terms of death rate and number of cases, then step B, more of us go back to work.
00:30:00.000Like 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.
00:30:13.000And other people are arguing we need to make this permanent.
00:30:15.000And this is where crap gets seriously ugly.
00:30:17.000OK, what we are in right now is global pandemic.
00:30:19.000It's unprecedented in the history of Western, in the history of modern Economics.
00:30:38.000Okay, 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.
00:30:50.000And that is what we are watching right now in real time.
00:30:53.000And that's like, I don't want to get political about this, but I'm not the one who made it political.
00:30:56.000I thought we were all on the same page.
00:30:58.000When the house is on fire, you put out the fire, but And when you got coronavirus, then maybe you need the hydroxychloroquine.
00:31:05.000But there are some people who insist that it's not sufficient for us to take the hydroxychloroquine and the azithromycin and the zinc.
00:31:11.000There are some people who are insistent that we down the fish tank cleaner.
00:31:15.000You take the hydroxychloroquine now, but we need to make that permanent.
00:31:18.000From now on, you're going to have to down a little bit of fish tank cleaner every day and destroy the American economy forever.
00:31:22.000That 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.
00:31:37.000That Senate bill last night passed 96-0.
00:31:40.000There is no disagreement that we need to do something now to stop complete economic meltdown.
00:31:45.000The 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.
00:31:53.000So, how bad is the economic downturn here?
00:32:07.000We have seen the local percentages of businesses open has dropped by 43% across America.
00:32:12.000The percentage of hourly employees working has dropped by 55% across America.
00:32:16.000So 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.
00:32:22.000I promise you, Warren Buffett's still making money.
00:33:50.000Bottom line here is that the economic realities are in fact realities, and that's something that we have to take into account.
00:33:56.000And we have to take that into account along with all of the new data that's being brought in from the UK.
00:34:00.000Again, I've yet to hear anybody in the federal or state government explain, when do we have enough ICU beds, that that's enough?
00:34:06.000And the answer is that maybe they don't know.
00:34:08.000We're gonna know in the next week or two.
00:34:10.000And to pretend that we can't make those calculations or start to make those calculations is absolutely foolhardy.
00:34:16.000Also, 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.
00:34:24.000Apparently, 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.
00:34:33.000Multiple early studies provide evidence of statistical ties between temperature and humidity ranges and the geographic regions where the virus has thrived.
00:34:40.000By 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?
00:34:52.000Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, he was out there saying this thing could be cyclical, right?
00:34:58.000We could be hit with a wave now, and then it could die off during the summer, and then it could hit again.
00:35:02.000But 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.
00:35:11.000Here's Anthony Fauci yesterday saying this thing could in fact be cyclical.
00:35:14.000Would this possibly become a seasonal cyclic thing?
00:35:18.000And I've always indicated to you that I think it very well might.
00:35:22.000And 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.
00:35:37.000And 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.
00:35:47.000Okay, but that gives us some time to actually build up the resources.
00:35:50.000Plus, we're going to know in fairly short order, I think, how many people have already had this thing.
00:35:54.000And then we'll actually have some real data.
00:35:55.000There 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.
00:36:03.000Meanwhile, Deborah Birx, who's heading up the president's efforts on coronavirus, headed up the AIDS effort by the U.S.
00:36:18.000Not President Trump, Dr. Deborah Birx making this point yesterday.
00:36:21.000The numbers that have been put out there are actually very frightening to people.
00:36:27.000But 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.
00:36:47.000That is nowhere close to the numbers that you see people putting out there.
00:36:51.000I think it has frightened the American people.
00:36:53.000I 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.
00:37:02.000And we know that every American is doing something.
00:37:07.000And 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.
00:37:21.000The Imperial College model is totally wrong.
00:37:23.000The British epidemiologist, I talked about this a moment ago, that British epidemiologist has admitted it was totally wrong.
00:37:51.000Distress debt balloons to near $1 trillion near the 2008 peak.
00:37:55.000According 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.
00:39:01.000According 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.
00:39:10.000It would also provide an extra $600 a week for four months.
00:39:14.000$301 billion in direct payments to households.
00:39:17.000$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.
00:39:23.000$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.
00:39:33.000That, by the way, companies are going to reject this.
00:39:36.000Companies are just going to not do it.
00:39:37.000Boeing already said, if you try to take a stake in us, we just won't take the loan.
00:39:41.000And so the government absolutely caved, and the Congress just created an exception for Boeing.
00:39:45.000They said they were a national security institution.
00:39:48.000$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.
00:40:00.000By the way, all sorts of money for like public transit?
00:40:04.000Which I don't know why that's necessary.
00:40:06.000Also, just a bunch of pork is in there.
00:40:09.000The Kennedy Center got tens of millions of dollars.
00:40:13.000The National Endowment for the Arts got tens of millions of dollars.
00:40:15.000The Corporation for Public Broadcasting got tens of millions of dollars.
00:40:19.000Listen, on any normal level, this bill's a bunch of crap.
00:40:24.000Given 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.
00:40:39.000He 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.
00:41:25.000In 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.
00:41:40.000I can tolerate some bad to do some good.
00:41:59.000Now is when the real political battle begins.
00:42:01.000Right 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.
00:42:06.000But 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.
00:42:13.000And you can see this break out into the open over specifically the provision that Graham is talking about.
00:42:17.000There was a provision in the bill that basically suggested that you should get $600 plus whatever salary you were making at your company.
00:42:45.000Why not incentivize people to be thrown out of work?
00:42:47.000This 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?
00:42:57.000So that they are not stuck in their jobs in order to gain health insurance.
00:43:00.000So Nancy Pelosi has long been on board with the idea of paying people to be unemployed.
00:43:03.000Here's Nancy Pelosi talking about all of this.
00:43:06.000The fact is, is that there is an imbalance in our country in income and therefore the unemployment benefits.
00:43:16.000It's complicated to make it calibrate for every state.
00:43:19.000So just call it $600 around the country.
00:43:22.000At 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.
00:43:37.000Okay, first of all, everything she's saying there is crap about how this economy is going to recover.
00:43:40.000It's not going to recover because you just put money in people's pockets.
00:43:43.000You think anyone right now is spending extra money?
00:43:45.000You think people are going out and buying?
00:43:48.000Okay, it's not a real thing until the coronavirus thing is solved.
00:43:50.000I 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?
00:43:56.000Like, I'm all in favor of tax cuts, but that ain't going to inject demand into this economy.
00:44:00.000That is not a thing that's going to happen right now.
00:44:02.000There is no demand because nothing's open because the government shut everything down.
00:44:06.000Then you had Bernie Sanders doing the same routine.
00:44:07.000Bernie talking about how, how could Republicans be so upset about expanding unemployment benefits beyond what they wanted originally?
00:44:22.000The point here is not that Republicans weren't expanding unemployment.
00:44:24.000It was their proposal to do so over the weekend.
00:44:26.000The 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?
00:44:37.000But here's Bernie Sanders grandstanding and being rewarded for it on Twitter.
00:44:40.000Twitter, by the way, is the dumbest place on earth.
00:44:42.000I've spent less and less time on Twitter over time.
00:44:45.000It is because it is a repository of idiocy and malice and just ridiculous garbage.
00:44:51.000Anyway, here is Bernie Sanders, who again was trending on Twitter.
00:44:54.000Thank 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.
00:45:04.000Now I find that some of my Republican colleagues are very distressed.
00:45:08.000They're very upset that somebody who's making 10, 12 bucks an hour might end up with a paycheck for four months.
00:45:26.000Somebody 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.
00:45:41.000Might be making a few bucks more for four months.
00:46:33.000We 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.
00:46:41.000Instead, 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.
00:46:51.000We'll get into more of this in just one second.
00:46:52.000First, if you haven't had a chance to see some of our new content called All Access Live, you should head on over to dailywire.com and check it out.
00:46:58.000Jeremy Boring and I kicked it off last week.
00:47:10.000We just we just chat it up and have a party and I play random music for you and answer your questions or Jeremy talks about religion or Michael just jabbers about I have no idea about what like Cigars and smoking jackets or something.
00:47:23.000The show's intended for our all-access members, but during this national emergency, this time of isolation, we know that everybody just needs to hang out and chill out.
00:47:29.000So party with us over at dailywire.com, our all-access live show.
00:48:02.000Okay, 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.
00:48:08.000But 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.
00:48:18.000It's a bad crisis, and so your immediate response is, but what if we could get a Green New Deal?
00:48:34.000The entire normal budget of the United States in a year, in which we'll run a $1 trillion deficit, is $4 trillion.
00:48:40.000We 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.
00:48:59.000Okay, but you're talking about making it permanent.
00:49:01.000We need to spend more and more and more and more.
00:49:03.000Why 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.
00:50:11.000At a certain point here, we're going to have to pay back these bonds.
00:50:13.000At 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.
00:50:18.000So, you are taking a short-term hit right now, but turning it into a long-term hit, a permanent hit, forever.
00:50:23.000Two 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?
00:50:30.000Joe Biden, who's barely a sentient human being at this point, I'm not sure that he's alive.
00:50:33.000Joe 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.
00:51:03.000You 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.
00:51:16.000We'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.
00:51:35.000One 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.
00:51:50.000Remember that time that the Obama administration tried this with shovel-ready jobs and then created zero jobs?
00:52:15.000You know what To help the folks this bill leaves out, including young people.
00:52:21.000This bill doesn't include student loan forgiveness, which would go a long way to providing immediate relief for those who need it the most.
00:52:29.000I support forgiving at least $10,000 in student loan debt per person now.
00:52:36.000It doesn't include the cost-free treatment for the COVID-19 Whatever the costs are related to that, it should be cost-free.
00:52:50.000Okay, guys, when I say this is going to turn into a political battle, this is what I mean.
00:53:20.000Well, 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.
00:53:31.000What the hell does that have to do with anything?
00:53:32.000He wants permanent hiring in the alternative energy infrastructure department.
00:53:36.000He says planning and rollout for a more expansive grid of electric cars, solar panels, and wind farms necessitates hiring workers.
00:53:42.000What the hell does that have to do with coronavirus?
00:53:46.000He says, if the economic and health reasons for stimulus through public sector hiring are not enough, consider two other benefits of government hiring.
00:53:51.000First, an infrastructure plan that relies largely or entirely on contractors will likely exacerbate the social and economic inequality that have torn our country apart.
00:54:01.000Government jobs provide solid benefits.
00:54:03.000Oh, 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.
00:54:14.000Listen, you got all of us on board because we had to.
00:54:17.000Some of us are not super happy about a $2 trillion spending plan.
00:54:20.000We 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.
00:54:35.000Maybe 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.
00:55:26.000Scott 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.
00:56:30.000Scott 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.
00:56:38.000On 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.
00:56:46.000The lawyer took to Twitter to add his own two cents.
00:56:48.000He 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.
00:56:59.000Okay, 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.
00:57:04.000And number two, he's expressing basically that you have to take everything into consideration but in a very gauche way.
00:57:10.000I mean, that would be the best way to describe what he is doing.
00:57:13.000He's saying that obviously every public policy is balanced.
00:57:15.000It's the same thing that happened with the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick.
00:57:19.000People are expressing the need to balance priorities in the dumbest possible way.
00:57:22.000But 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.
00:57:42.000People called him a liberal and a white right-wing nut, even a Nazi.
00:57:45.000They threatened his livelihood, his family, his home.
00:57:46.000Polite 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.
00:57:54.000The 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.
00:58:06.000MacMillan told the Washington Post, I'm not a cold-hearted monster.
00:58:11.000MacMillan was not the first person to express the idea.
00:58:13.000It'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.
00:58:18.000In 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.
00:58:27.000So, Washington Post immediately jumped into the story.
00:58:30.000And 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?
00:58:44.000He 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.
00:59:03.000He 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.
00:59:33.000Gloria's a retired high school English teacher.
00:59:35.000They'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.
00:59:43.000Well, 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.
00:59:51.000He said he went out, not bothering with gloves or mask, and then he stopped by Walmart to look at canned goods.
00:59:55.000He bought some coolant, and his wife yelled at him.
00:59:58.000Since the Walmart trip, they've continued their not-productive life at home.
01:00:01.000Their main activity is watching news, says Gloria.
01:00:04.000Jim and Gloria like to argue about the virus, the president, pretty much anything they argue about, whether they argue it about who wins.
01:00:10.000They agree with their son, Scott, that Trump dallyed too long and failed to act.
01:00:13.000They agree with their son, Scott, the president is right to push now to restart the economy.
01:00:17.000And 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.
01:00:26.000So, I guess that they called his parents and his parents were like, okay.
01:01:43.000Hey everybody, it's Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show.
01:01:46.000You know, some people are depressed because the American Republic is collapsing, the end of days is approaching, and the moon has turned to blood.
01:01:52.000But on The Andrew Klavan Show, that's where the fun just gets started.