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Zebras in Africa have a problem. They have to drink water to survive, but they haven’t mastered the science of plumbing. And because of this dearth of technical know-how, they can’t transport potable water to a safe location, and they have to subject themselves to the terror of crocodiles.
Zero Zebra Deaths Aren’t an Option
Zebras, I’m sure, would prefer a world in which no zebra was ever eaten by a crocodile. But in order for that world to exist, every zebra in Africa would have to forego drinking water. Not good. Every zebra foregoing water would mean the extinction of the zebra species. The lack of plumbing skills has thus forced upon our zebras a very lamentable choice: drink water and suffer crocodile deaths, or don’t drink water and suffer many more dehydration deaths. And as the above video grimly attests, zebras have chosen a smaller number of crocodile deaths over a larger number of dehydration deaths.
Is the Coronavirus Our Crocodiles?
Sadly, I think the coronavirus and our profligate ways have placed us in the same predicament as zebras. Consider the following:
- In order to survive, human beings have to work. Work is what brings food to grocery stores, water to faucets, clothing to retailers, electricity to outlets, gas to gas stations, and medicine to hospitals. And work is what is done to earn the money that facilitates the trade we need to conduct with grocery stores, water companies, retailers, electric companies, gas stations, hospitals, and all the other providers of goods and services that we rely on in a modern economy.
- The half-life of work is very short. In other words, the beneficial results of work don’t extend very far into the future. If we don’t keep working, the paychecks will stop, and all the trade that those paychecks facilitate will stop as well, resulting in millions of bankrupt companies and government agencies, tens of millions of unemployed, and mass misery and death.
- Fortunately, man has devised two ingenious ways to extend the half-life of work: savings and credit. If you save several months of expenses, you can stop working for several months and still have money to buy essential goods and services. Also, if you have several credit cards with unused balances, you can forego work and buy essential goods and services on credit for as long as your credit limit lasts.
Now, assuming for the moment that coronadiles (i.e., the coronavirus) are every bit as dangerous to us as crocodiles are to zebras, have we built up enough savings and credit to forego all the work that is necessary to drastically minimize the danger of coronadiles?
I have my doubts.
It would be one thing if pre-pandemic the national debt was a quarter of the GDP, every state pension fund was fully funded, 75 percent of adults had a year or more of expenses saved in their emergency funds, most adults had plenty of unused credit, our industrial base was robust, the typical adult owned his or her home outright, and our safety net was little used. If our pre-pandemic fiscal health were that strong, I’d say, “Hell, yeah. Shutter the non-essential portion of the economy for a year and backstop that coerced unemployment by putting five trillion dollars on the national credit card. We got this.”
But our pre-pandemic fiscal health was far from rosy. Here are some of the grim details:
- In February of 2020, the national debt was roughly 107 percent of GDP.
- Only two states (Wisconsin and South Dakota) had fully-funded pension systems. The worst state, Kentucky, had only funded 33.9 percent of its pension system.
- Twenty-eight percent of adults had no savings. Twenty-five percent of adults had fewer than three months of expenses saved. Only 18 percent of adults had six or more months of expenses saved.
- The average adult had an unused credit card balance of roughly $25,000. But averages aren’t always a good measure of something because averages are warped by extremes. And that’s the story here. The average adult may have had $25,000 of unused credit, but many adults had far less than that. Sixty-seven percent of adults aged 18 to 29, for instance, didn’t own a single credit card and thus had no readily available credit to smooth over a financial crisis.
- Many of the key tools in the fight against a virus that attacks the respiratory system weren’t made here. Things such as ventilators, respirators, test kits, masks, face shields, gloves, gowns, and hand sanitizer were largely made in China.
- Thirty-six percent of household heads rented their homes, 40 percent of household heads had a mortgage, and only 24 percent of household heads owned their homes free and clear. That’s a lot of people who had to come up with a mortgage or rent payment every month.
- Forty million Americans were on food stamps pre-pandemic. Seventy-four million Americans were on Medicaid. Sixty-five million Americans were receiving Social Security benefits, and for roughly 25 percent of the elderly recipients, Social Security was essentially their only source of income. That’s a lot of people who were dependent on a lot of workers paying a lot of taxes to the government.
Frankly, I don’t think we were fiscally strong enough for a two-week lockdown, nevermind the ham-fisted five-month lockdown we’ve endured to date. Two generations of fiscal profligacy, in both the public and private sector, has reduced us to the helplessness of zebras. Yes, the federal printing press has masked this helplessness for the time being. But how much longer can we hide behind funny money and not address reality? How long before most of the shuttered business are never able to reopen? How long before federal borrowing begins to produce double-digit inflation or worse?
The national debt is rapidly approaching $27 trillion. That’s 136 percent of our GDP. We can’t continue this way. Deaths by coronadiles will pale in comparison to deaths by a collapsed economy. The chickens of two generations of fiscal profligacy have come home to roost. It’s time to open the economy, take reasonable precautions (i.e., wear a mask in public), and brave the lurking danger of coronadiles until a vaccine makes that lurking danger moot.
Final Thoughts
Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? I say we are too fiscally weak to continue worrying about coronadiles. We got to open up the economy and take our chances. Continuing the lockdown and purposefully bringing about another great depression or Weimar Republic levels of inflation will produce far more death than the coronadiles ever will. But, then again, maybe I’m nuts. Maybe coronadiles are a bigger threat than I suppose. Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.
Love the analogy, Mr. G. Sorry it’s been a long time since I’ve been over here. Most Americans were not prepared for the financial crisis which has hit us as a result of the shut down.
I’m in favor of opening back up all the way. I think some of the silver linings from all of this, is many of us have learned to work from home while some businesses must operate in person. However, we’ve all learned how to do it with precautions and finally, people are forced to stay home if they are sick! So let’s get back to full operation.
Deanna @ Recovering Women Wealth recently posted…Making Financial Amends in Recovery
I think you take this stance from a position of strength (good for you). Some people are not able to (physically) just throw caution to the wind and let the consequences happen. For a lot of people, that kind of devil-may-care attitude would leave their children/families without them..and then where would the country be? I get what you’re saying fiscally, but I thought this country was better than just boiling it all down to money.
Oof.
In Australia we shut down both internal and external borders almost straight away. We’d be in a fantastic position if the Victorian government hadn’t f***ed up the hotel quarantines. Now we in Victoria are under a stage 4 lockdown while the rest of the country is living life as usual.
By doing this, the coronadiles are kept at manageable levels while the zebras can frolic. Short-term pain for long-term gain.
Ah, the perils of federalism. Who were using the Victorian hotels? Aussies from other states?
I don’t want to engage in a drawn out debate in this forum, but this is not a cold and the relative and absolute risks are far greater than flu. The numbers of deaths so far outpace an entire bad flu season by 2 1/2 times, and that’s over only 5 months. If, as I’ve seen in some forums, there assertion that the risk of dying from covid is ‘only’ .001 (est 300k deaths in 12 months in 300 million pop), the death rate from flu is .0001, (30k deaths in 300m pop). So, ten times higher than flu. That’s not less deadly than the flu by any measure.
The neurological impacts and long term pulmonary implications of corona are already becoming apparent. Use of high level of interventions for these patients (ECMO, proning, etc) are proof that this is a deadly and damaging virus.
I’m not arguing the merits of shutting down the economy. Mr. Groovy makes a lot of good points here, as he usually does. But spreading misinformation about the impact of Covid 19 is harmful and, with almost 200,000 deaths, it’s a bit alarming to see that some still adhere to this notion.
Excellent points as always, Mr. G. I went to the CDC website, and thus far this year, the United States has suffered 11 percent more deaths than expected. So Covid is hardly the flu. But it’s certainly not the bubonic plague either. And here are two other variables that complicate the situation: trust and competency. I don’t trust our leadership in journalism, academia, big tech, and government, and don’t find our leadership in journalism, academia, and government to be competent either. (Big tech is very competent, and I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse.) So I’m at a loss. Damn, no one ever said freedom and democracy were going to be easy. Thanks for chiming in, Mr. G. I can always count on you for a sobering dose of reality. Cheers.
Thanks for the response Mr G.
My original reply to a commenter took so much of my wildfire-smoke-addled brain power that I didn’t give proper recognition to the brilliance of your zebra-and-crocodile analogy. Coming from a long career in healthcare, I tend to gravitate towards treatment, prevention and containment. However, evidence-based medicine attempts to do the most good for the most people, using data to inform decisions. We can’t save all patients. It’s not realistic. And we can’t prevent all zebra deaths by crocodile. What we can do, and what the zebras do, is take reasonable risks to assure a reasonable chance of success. We can’t say, “ahh, there are no crocodiles”, nor can we say that every zebra can be spared if we only take certain steps. The truth lies in the middle.
As a happy member and participant of this economic system, I want things to be open, and as a member of the human race, I want my fellow humans to be reasonable and not expose me or others to unnecessary crocodile risk.
Thanks for what might be one of my favorite Groovy posts!
I don’t know the answers either. I am watching what other countries such as Canada, Sweden, South Korea, UK etc are doing. You can think of each country as running a separate “experiment” on how they’re handling covid. With time, we’ll see the success and failures of each country’s different covid policies. So far, among the wealthy nations, the US seems to be one of the less successful attempts of dealing with the virus.
Agreed. Hopefully, the CDC will study other countries and see why some handled Covid better than we did. My guess is that our federal system of distributive power didn’t help matters. It’s hard to coordinate a response when the federal government doesn’t have the authority to tell the 50 states what to do. I also suppose that our overall physical health didn’t help matters as well. It’s hard to minimize a force-multiplier like Covid when there’s so much underlying disease for Covid to force-multiply on. Don’t we lead the world in obesity, diabetes, and hypertension?
I don’t know the answers.
I *do* know that there are a lot of people who aren’t “working” that are continuing to draw their paycheck.
Those of us who have seen a dramatic decrease in pay (I’m down 80% for the year), are having to continue to pay taxes and have less services, while some are drawing their pay.
I hear ya, my friend. I pandemic to date has had absolutely no effect on my fiscal well-being. In fact, my net worth is greater now than when the pandemic started. But I can’t help but think of my fellow Americans who have lost jobs and businesses as a result of the lockdown. How much longer can they hold out? Or are they going to be completely ruined and forced to join the ranks of our already bloated dependency class? Not my preference, of course. But I’m afraid too many Americans fear Covid more than they fear the damage of a lockdown-induced economic collapse.
Nobody talks about the lost productivity. Jobs don’t just produce a paycheck, they produce goods and services. If nothing is being produced, your money is WORTHLESS! This is the problem faced by socialist and third world countries. If your “job” is waiting in breadlines, who’s producing bread? And why are you surprised that it’s all gone when you reach the front of the line?
Also, why are we concerned about a vaccine for something that is basically a cold – less deadly than flu? We don’t panic like this for the flu. This nonsense has to stop.
Agreed. We’re the victim of our own success, so to speak. Far too many Americans have no idea what the pain of a real economic calamity feels like. And far too many Americans have no idea what work is needed to keep a modern economy humming along. Too many Americans think the federal government is the Tooth Fairy, that it can make wealth out of thin air and just pass it on to the huddled masses. If we continue to be extremely risk-averse, it’s not going to end well.
I didn’t know I married a Karen. Masks? Puleeze! No scientific proof whatsoever. Have you not heard a thing I said the last 5 months? C’mone now.
Mrs Groovy recently posted…Of Zebras and Crocodiles
Did Mrs G just call Me G a Karen in front of the entire world. My, my, but this is certainly entertaining reading.
If Coronadiles can eat us, fiscal responsibility is our plumbing. I’ve got plenty of running water at my house, glad I don’t have to face those nasty Coronadiles to get a drink…
LOL! Same here, my friend. Same here.
I hear ya, pookums. But if the placebo of mask-wearing gives the public the courage to end the lockdown, I say bring on the masks!
I agree with The Crusher. Incidentally, I looked up the coronadile numbers yesterday on the CDC website. To date, 6.4 million people in the US have tested positive for COVID. That’s 0.019 percent of the population. 192,388 people had died from COVID. My calculator won’t let me calculate a percentage that low, so I have no idea what the actual death rate from COVID is in the US. BUT, if we take some people’s skewed calculation of dividing number of deaths by number of cases, then 0.03 percent of COVID cases have resulted in death. I totally agree that every death is a travesty. But is that low of a number worth what we’ve put our country through? Financial ruin? Emotional ruin? Rising depression, suicide, addiction, and domestic violence rates?
It is actually 1.9% of the population testing positive. (6.4 million/332 million) x 100 = 1.93. No doubt there are far more people positive for Covid than have been tested. More testing and tracing would be a good thing.
Also, 3% of Covid deaths have resulted in death. Big difference. Of course, the rates skew much higher in older populations so the attitudes of young adults are understandable but not necessarily laudable. Regardless of your take on the numbers – and you are off by 2 factors of magnitude – we should be protecting the elderly and those with underlying conditions.
Our large county with a tiny population had very few cases and 1 death prior to August. Then some workers from an assisted living facility went to a party. Now we have many more cases and 14 deaths. Most of those new deaths were patients at the facility.
If herd immunity involves positive rates of 40%-60% then we have a long way to go.
The fact remains that the death rate versus the US population is incredibly minute. And that the other factors caused by the mask wearing and the shutdown are far more impactful on our society. yes, protect the elderly and at risk. They should be wearing 95 masks because n95 masks protect the wearers. They don’t protect the people around the wearers. Read the scientific data on that. it’s all about smart management. Not unmanagement.
Agreed. Deaths of despair are a big problem, and they have only been exasperated by the lockdown.
Great points, Nick. But where does this all end? Must we completely disrupt our lives from now on whenever something more dangerous than the common flu comes along? Supposedly, the Hong Kong flu killed 100,000 Americans in 1968. I never even heard of the Hong Kong flu until lockdown detractors pointed it out. Again, I’m not saying Covid is a scam. Covid 19 is a new strain of Covid that is particularly harmful to those with underlying ailments. I’m just saying that we’re too fiscally weak to continue with the lockdown. And absent a new stimulus package from the federal government, we’ll see what tradeoffs lockdown states such as North Carolina prefer: A minimum of Covid deaths and an uncomfortable economic crisis? Or an uncomfortable number of Covid deaths and a return to economic normalcy? It should be interesting.
And of the Covid deaths, how many only had Covid? According to the CDC, only 6 percent of Covid deaths had no underlying ailments.
Well said. I do fundamentally agree. We be to move forward cautiously and logically. But we do need to move forward. Since when did it become unacceptable for anyone to become sick? Unfortunately, sickness is a part of daily life. Always has been. We try to minimize the impact and should continue to do so BUT we need a more balanced approach.
Giving our fundamental fiscal weakness, I don’t know how we continue with the lockdown. Moving forward “cautiously and logically” is the way to go. Great comment, my friend.
Thank you.
I realize another likely truth when I re-read my comment today: my early morning grammar is terrible! 🙂