Please consider ‘We Just Can’t Feed This Many‘
In perhaps the most sobering reminder yet of the economic fallout caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the San Antonio Food Bank aided about 10,000 households Thursday in a record-setting giveaway.
“It was a rough one today,” said Food Bank president and CEO Eric Cooper after the largest single-day distribution in the nonprofit’s 40-year history. “We have never executed on as large of a demand as we are now.”
The majority of vehicles began lining up to enter the parking lot at Traders Village well before dawn for the 10 a.m. kick off.
“It looked like prairie dogs out there, with all the people standing on top of their trucks, trying to get an eagle-eye view of the line to see how much longer they had to wait,” said Brian Billeck, marketing manager at Traders Village.
Wow.
This is truly saddening. It’s the modern day version of the Great Depression soup lines.
I would rather see money go to these efforts than how Congress formulated some parts of the graft-laden federal programs.
People don’t wait hours in food lines for milk and dried beans unless they truly need it.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Reply to Tengen re Walter Williams relevance as an economist—
Tengen your argument is absurd and untrue.. You would do well to get on Utube and watch all of Walter William’s videos and get educated
Well Art Izagud I agree you don’t need COPS to prove your value of service to yourself or your friends—but you sure will need COPS (money) When you go to make a claim against your fellowman at the car dealer or grocery store. I would suggest you learn a skill that is of high value to your fellowman so you can get many certificates of performance otherwise you will always be needy unhappy and unskilled
In Boise we have excess capacity at the Food Bank. I was surprised to see notices that people need to come get the food. Our case rate is about 1 per 100,00, same as much of the country.
I hope we are just seeing the American love of free shit, I am concerned tho that the policy responses are just the same old same old, we are gonna have no middle class after this.
The stimulus approach is wrong. it is the SOS. The problem is that with so many not working, there is no real place to spend much of the stimulus money. Smart people will be saving what the government gives them, if they can.
This should be a wake-up call to the U.S.
Depending upon any government, Federal, state, or local, to take care of you is foolhardy at best. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking commerce or citizenry. Only public ‘servants’ will escape the fallout–I suspect none have been furloughed since this began.
If not a public ‘servant’, then, the greater the dependence, the greater the damage. And it will get far worse.
The Founders would be ashamed.
Some people will pay attention and learn from this experience. Most will not.
Almost ALL of the cars in that picture look CONSIDERABLY newer than what is sitting in my garage/driveway.
Consumerism run amok. Buy a nice stupid car or truck you don’t need, don’t worry about feeding yourself.
Most of the people at the lower economic level don’t BUY a 30k car. They LEASE (rent) it, forever being stuck with $300-500/month car payments and never gain any equity.
The question becomes are those cars paid for in full or are they on an 84 month note and waiting/avoiding the repo man… Are they shared or borrowed cars… their parents or a car that is bringing in multiple families? Then, if you look at the rate of subprime auto loans that are in arrears (like 1 in 5 in 2019) it is even scarier because in the car-centric US of A these vehicles are life lines that when they go away there will be even more trouble. How do people then get to the bread lines? We have multiple levels of crises that are surfacing because of one little organism. People will desperately want a scapegoat because that is their only way of making sense of the custerf**k situation and instead of feeding people will find it easier to punish (I do not have a lot of faith in people to act rationally).
I wonder how much less those cars are worth than they were 2 months ago. Probably way less since the buyer base has been extinguished by the central planners.
Wow! Truly sad. Another month or two will break the back of the US body politic (as well as other similar countries). But will such structural damage result in the country throwing off the yoke imposed by the parasitical financial elite, or will the latter finally get the totalitarian ‘monopoly capitalism’ which by nature they must always strive to achieve?
Time will tell..
Chris Hedges wrote a book 2 years ago called “America’s Farewell Tour”. With all the “money” being flowed out of the US into the Euro, I am wondering if he is right and that $1200.00 per person is the Soviet Union style sign off bonus.
Headline at marketwatch – “16 million people just got laid off but U.S. stocks had their best week in 45 years”
So if 30 million get laid off, US stocks would have their best week in 100 years. Powell, great going! After all what does a few millions unemployed matter if it is going to get stocks to its ATH. Powell, you can do it. Give them moar!!
Look at the horror stories coming from Florida,There unemployment benefits system was permanently shut down by Rick Scott,now millions of folks who need that cash are SOL,billions in tax dollars meant for unemployment comp gone (to Slick Rick’s Cayman account)!Where did all that cash (after the boys in Tallahasse took there cut)go?
I did some fact checking. It didn’t take long for me to conclude former governor Rick Scott never shut down Florida’s unemployment system. Given the length of time (over 5 years) people had to adjust to changes in the unemployment “benefits”, people simply shirked their personal responsibility. People who lived well below their means are weathering this storm much better. Unemployment is a moral hazard. The true moral is to be an ant, not a grasshopper.
You nailed my friend.
What do you think the folks in their houses are going to do when attacked by a mob of hungry people. They’re going to take out their guns and shoot at them. Along with their neighbors.
When?
In the mean time, farmers and food companies who supplied restaurants say demand has collapsed. Dairy farmers are dumping milk they can’t sell in an unfree market.
The seen and the unseen. The ultimate benefits to all this lunacy will be slim, immeasurable (How many lives saved by staggering ventilator use? Compared to sealing nursing homes and quarantining risk groups for 2 months)?
The costs in human life years is going to easily be 1000× any alleged benefits. Taking the third world into account (the most vulnerable are in the poorest countries where any spike in food prices means deaths, judging by the last two recessions) we will only need to argue about the number of 0’s to add.
Ultimately there will be no cost/benefit analysis in the MSM, not beforehand, not ever.
Once people start to get back to work, it will take years to repair their household finances and build financial safety nets. The steep selloff in the stock market will encourage people to amass cash and cash-like investments. This shock has convinced many that social safety nets (charity and gov’t) are insufficient and unreliable. Discretionary spending and investing will be muted for years.
Good, they believed fair tales told by liars (politicians)
I agree. What’s going on is big, part of a geopolitical struggle which involves the world financial system. I don’t think the current one is going to be left standing once we emerge from the rubble of this conflict.
There is a war because the various power networks have reached an impasse. It cannot yet be known which ones will win and which will lose. It is possible that this will result in a clean sweep to the benefit of most of us, or also possible that we end up in some sort of techno-utopia-cum-dystopia.
We’ll know fairly soon, I suspect, but sometimes these things take years and millions of people die in the process fighting enemies they don’t even know why they are fighting. Truth, after all, is the first casualty of war, and the enemies they tell us we are fighting against are rarely the real enemies.
Sounds Inflationary
Maybe the administration would take a bit more care with the coronavirus pandemic if it weren’t loaded with folks who are looking forward to the end of the world link to rollingstone.com
The Stupocolypse! And people were worried about idiocracy…
RollingStone. There are many good reasons why only morons and adolescents listen to what comes from this cultural milieu …
Classic polemic disinformation fodder.
Works every time.
Nothing new here –Socialism does not work.
beliefs that government is here to help you it lead to penury and slavery.
same as belief in fiat money.
Those people in line would have no food without socialism. What do you think they would do after a few days without food… and why do you think they’re broke in the first place? Lots of 30k cars in that line…
Not true
If socialism hadn’t banned the from building houses where and when they wanted to, they’d have all the money they have been forced to spend on usury rent to buy food for.
Ditto, and closely related, if socialism hadn’t forced them, by way of debasement and “legal” robbery, to subsidize the lifestyles of the utterly zero-value-add leeches in FIRE and ambulance chasing rackets which have consumed an ever greater share of national economic output over the past century.
After “this” bailout you talk about the “Legal Robbery” and Debasement of socialism. You got balls the size of Alpha Centari or a brain the size of a quark…
“Those people in line would have no food without socialism.”
It was capitalism that produced the food.
Socialism didn’t do what you’re seeing.
Most food banks are private charities. Indeed some of them get some government money but the lion’s share of their operation is private.
The reason most of those people are in those lines is because the fully taxpayer-funded socialist government programs have failed them.
Capitalism does not work either…
The redistribute wealth to the top through bailout and tax breaks, the only difference between the two…
Seeing the empty shelves in my local supermarket was surreal and now seeing multiple stories form multiple states of car-park lines to the food banks makes me think that the old Soviets are tittering. They got theirs, now it is our turn. Our planned economy is failing now because it is too sclerotic and corrupt and failed to ensure the citizenry was taken care of beyond the the comfortable politically correct party members who parrot Fox/CNN (Pravda) news sound bites.
@AshH , where is the tea party? Big government is picking our (the working class’) pockets by giving massive bailouts to their friends and relatives and giving comparative chump-change to everyone else: so the tea party was just a purge of the Mensheviks. The Supreme Soviet is here and the Premier gives news conferences daily!
The main difference now between republicans and democrats: borrow and spend vs tax and spend. The only thing that makes democrats worse is their ardent push to disarm citizens.
The Dems are obviously worse on that account, but by less of a margin than it may initially appear.
What matters for freedom, is the difference in level of armament between The People and The State. Not simply the absolute levels of the former. Back when single shot muskets was all the cops and standing army had access to, single shot muskets in general ownership, provided quite reliable protection against government overreach. Not so today.
While the GOP are generally more OK with people owning, and sometimes even carrying if they have been “granted” the “privilege” by some anointed taxfeeder, some peashooter which a hundred or so years ago may have been quite the marvel of totalitarian state oppression resistance; that same GOP is at least as busy arming police and the standing army to an even greater degree. Leaving the net gain vs the Dems less that what immediately meets the eye.
In practice, it has been known quite unequivocally since at least the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, that, at a minimum, The People need to reliably be able to shoot down helicopter gunships and other light to medium armed low flying aircraft in order to deter overreach. Over the past decade, ditto drones. And also, that they need to be able to deter armored vehicles.
None of the required equipment for which “mainstream” GOPers seem to have any interest in facilitating The People procuring. Instead focusing on ensuring the totalitarian state is the one which constantly get their kit updated and strengthened, at The People’s expense.
The People need to reliably be able to shoot down helicopter gunships and other light to medium armed low flying aircraft in order to deter overreach. And that my friend was the beginning of the end for us. Had we not armed them we wouldn’t be in neck deep in shit in the middle east shithole
The way to avoid being “in neck deep in shit in the middle east shithole”, is to not not be there in the first place.
As long as Robinson has gunships, Friday either has the means to shoot them down, or he is nothing more than a slave. As The Founders understood, but subsequent generations of Americans very obviously don’t, there are no way around that truism.
Your post reminded me of something…
For many years, “policing” in the US was a private affair. If you wanted “security” for some reason, you paid for it yourself.
The first official “police department” wasn’t established until the 1830s when big businesses in Boston got tired of using their own money to pay for their private security and used politics to convince everyone that a “police force” was a “public good” and should be a government entity paid for by the taxpayers in the city.
This was adopted in one way or another by other major cities and the idea really took off during the prohibition years which marked the true beginning of today’s “police force.”
Which means the concept of the “police” as we know them today is really less than a century old. And it was started by big business using politicians to do their bidding.
Same as it ever was.
Michigan State “Police” blocked off traffic on I-75 and are not letting people into the state. This started Saturday morning. It wasn’t blocked off Thursday night. Of course, this is because of covid 19.
APRIL 10, 2020
In global war on coronavirus, some fear civil rights are collateral damage
It’s not because of a virus.
Spain and other countries are starting to return to work next week. A lot of people are beginning to realize that they have gotten snookered about how infectious and dangerous the CV19 virus really is. Politicians are going to pay a heavy price come the Nov elections the longer they keep the country shut-down.
In Spain, some nonessential employees can go back to work starting Monday.
April 11, 2020
Spain, the only European country hit harder than Italy by the pandemic, is preparing to ease restrictions as the number of deaths fall, allowing some nonessential employees to return to work on Monday. But Health Minister Salvador Illa insisted his country was not in a “de-escalation phase” and the World Health Organization warned that any loosening of limits carries risk.
You would have to translate it but
has a guide to what conditions they are imposing for this. So far they have only leveled off infections really, so I guess we will find out what effects different restriction lifting has over time. They keep extending when state of emergency ends. In Sweden they recently agreed to allow a lockdown if chosen, did not implement it yet, but some of their approach was being found difficult ( very high CFR in closed cases for example).
Yes we’ve all been snookered. Those deaths really didnt happen and there is nothing to worry about. I’m sure the mass grave in New York is with wooden crates in it is just fake too.
They were relatively few deaths. Still far less than flu deaths in most any year. What ARE you smoking?
So professional epidemiologists didn’t follow your wise advice? Scandalous!
Okay not to be sarcastic, but epidemiologists appear to me to be reasonable people doing honest scientific work. Their models and projections have huge uncertainties in them, especially between best case (IHME) and worst case (Imperial College) assumptions — which I take to reflect the actual uncertainty that we are (still) stuck with.
Contrast with climate scientists who claim to know the global mean temperature of an entire planet to the tenth of a degree! and then forecast it out for decades!!
One thing we should be learning in all of this (but won’t) is that the modelling of complex natural systems is REALLY hard, just shy of impossible … and those global warming computer programs can’t possibly be telling us a damn thing.
Researchers of the UG(university of Gent) believe that genetic differences define resistance against C19. ” Populations with polymorphism of the ACE1 gen are less affected” That would explain why eastern and Scandinavian people with the specific gen are less affected than their southern counterparts. In Belgium for example, the most affected region is Limburg, with its vast population of italian origin( italian immigrants working in the coal mines in the fifties and sixties)….and what about NY with Italians being the largest ethnic population …..Coincidence?
OMG! It’s a global conspiracy. Lord Soros is running rampant!
The country needs to demand more from candidates running for office and push for better candidates. We need candidates who can solve really issues not just pander to their base. Look at the 2016 presidential election for example. Democrats run Hillary as if she is the incumbent. For the Republican field that year, I thought Chris Christie was the most qualified and had the most integrity of the group.
Don’t get me started on this year’s democratic field for president.
We get the politicians we deserve. The age of the screen & the average voter votes on image over substance.
Also, even if someone came along knowing & prepared to do what needs to be done……..imagine the masses accepting it. Live within your means, save, go without to repair everyone’s balance sheet, mend and make do for 2 or 3 generations = revolution.
It will only happen when there is no alternative and the pain of not doing it is the highest pain.
Tony Soprano for president??
Corrupt chris christie???
That’s YOUR best, what low standards!!!
Where is the Tea Party? I’d expect them to be going bananas over bailing out corps and 1%ers at the expense of the 99%ers. Or maybe they were just an anti-Obama group with no real guiding principles after all?
Locked inside their house be Government Edict. Really freemen.
I believe most of them are with Trump now.
(Funny, my real name is Ash… H… but you got that moniker!)
Tea Party and “End the Fed” individuals were the only ones with a shred of sanity 12 years ago, but were endlessly ridiculed … by geniuses who are NOW a-wishin’ and a-hopin’ that their 401K’s go back up, but can’t connect the dots.
80,000 people died from the flu in the US a few years back. This is all so unnecessary. A complete overreaction by a guy fighting yesterday’s war.
yep and how many thousands die in car wrecks? The point here is for this emergency/war we dont have even enough plastic gloves to go around for our citizens let alone masks and ventilators. plastics http://alettertou.simplesite.com
It’s not about a virus.
@Greggg
I’m not surprised how few thinkers exist. The herd believes everything they are told.
Do you know that it wouldn’t have turned into 200k+ dead if not for the distancing measures? How do you know it?
Social distancing, what a joke. This is having no effect on this overblown flu season.
The damage caused by the shut down is a million times as bad as the so-called outbreak.
The proof? The total death rates for everywhere are
flat or going down.
BTW China is ramping up as quick as it can after realizing their mistake in overreacting.
Also if it was sooooo bad in China why didn’t the ever shut down Beijing or Shanghai or other major cities or provinces?
I suspect and hope that the virus will turn out to have had a far lower mortality rate and R0 etc than epis had feared. Of course no one knew it 6 weeks ago, because we don’t even know it now. That is where risk management comes in.
Also proof: those countries that didn’t social distance are flattening their curves faster than the ones who did. I guess more people get infected and immune faster and so it peters out more quickly.
Clearly this thing is a deliberately used tool in a conflict. But that conflict is not the traditional shoot-out between nation states, but rather a sort of global civil war between competing systems which have reached an impasse and so are now more openly trying to shake things loose. We’ll see who wins the end – if we live that long.
Which countries didn’t implement social distancing? Even Sweden has closed secondary schools and colleges. The government is also advocating social distancing but is trusting its people to do so without imposing a lockdown. If they’re successful, maybe it’s a viable model. They’ve certainly had it worse than the other Nordic countries that did lockdown, but perhaps not bad enough to justify a lockdown.
Not in Spain they aren’t. I’m not fully decided so won’t argue, but equally the restrictions and chasing down of infections outside of Hubei had an effect, plus any reporting from China is not easily verifiable.
Most of the real ugly videos from Guyaquil, Ecuador got removed from the internet…great footage of what happens when this beast is allowed to burn thru the population. Dead bodies everywhere, bodies being burned in the street. Huge clouds of carrion birds feeding on the dead bodies stacked behind the hospital. Our political leaders would be removed if they allowed something like that to happen here. People are not stupid enough to not social distance when they see this occuring around them as well. If humans were robots financially we might be better off to let it kill upwards of 15 million mostly old and sick but in reality the social, political, and financial repercussions would also be huge. Plus we do not yet know enough about this little beastie…we might have nastier rounds with mutated forms of this coming.
This is scary because for those of us who are doing ok this could easily spill over in the form of crimes such as home invasion. No job, no money, nothing to lose. All they can worry about is the precious stock market. This entire country is set to implode. They better hurry and realize they aren’t going to have time to implement all their “dont let a crisis go to waste” bs agenda because this place is going to get burnt down before long I fear.
Can you picture a debt laden bandit robbing a person living within their means? The bandit leaves his home of which he will most likely not have to pay the mortgage for 6 months, gets in his newer car whose monthly payments are being forgone with impunity, drives to the nearby apartment complex which has a parking lot full of beater cars, goes to the prudent resident and exclaims “your money or your life!”
Then if the bandit goes to prison the prudents taxes are used to shelter and feed him or the prudents offspring are burdened by more Gov debt to do exactly that.
You can’t make this crap up.
Incredible times we live in!
Just wondering how many if those people voted for tRump and will vote for him again this year
All of them plus democrats. The democrats let it into the country.
Trump was the Republican hope for change. Like Obama, he did not deliver.
Wonder how many of those lined up are US citizens and how many are illegal aliens.
I would guess that US citizens in need of assistance are on government programs that use EBT cards that are used in grocery stores to purchase food
That is what I wonder, doesn’t the US have food stamps or something ? Maybe not everyone is enrolled, or maybe there is a delay for newly unemployed or something? Would be good if someone in US could explain briefly how this works to those outside.
The food situation needs to be solved THIS WEEK. We will not have an orderly society if this situation is not solved to a great extent. Gun sales reflect the public’s understanding of the danger lurking in this dire need. The economy needs to reopen.
To shut down the economy of the U.S. to such an extent was a tragic mistake because it was based on projections that have proved wildly off of the mark.
We have gone from one to two million potential deaths to a projection of 60,00 all in the course of 3 weeks.
No way that will happen (economy reopening soon) in my opinion. The projections can be argued in various ways, one of those arguments is that without restrictions the numbers would be much higher, but we are all guessing to a degree. The point is that now restrictions are in place they will not be lifted until it is thought other measures are in place to contain the epidemic. In Spain they stopped all but essential work, and the soon to be lifting of that restriction is still mired in protocol, like workplace rules of distancing, shift work etc. , and still no places of congregation allowed. In UK they are talking of a year and a half with some restrictions in place
There is not likely to be a nice bell curve to the epidemic, instead we will be presented with a lowered background of infections eventually which risk turning into an outbreak if whatever measures are not followed.
Whether anyone thinks the virus is exaggerated or not, it does look like the lanscape of activity is going to be “redesigned” in the coming months, in several countries. Hopefully the US won’t get too tangled up in that.
“The point is that now restrictions are in place they will not be lifted until it is thought other measures are in place to contain the epidemic.”
Exactly. Most authorities are going to be in full CYA mode now and will be very slow to give up the restrictions they have in place. They are not focused on unshackling people as soon as is practical (despite what they may say) — because anyone who gets the job of politician/authority these days is of the type that they don’t know and don’t care about individual liberties. One doesn’t attract votes or political favor by caring about that fuddy duddy Enlightenment stuff.
People are going to be psychologically marked by this from now on. You see it from whatever other themes of the day are played out, except this time it will be everyone who is subject to it, and those exercising authority will have a perfect alibi of representing the common good. I would believe them if they had actually acted that way from the start, but instead it is mostly a lot of people who were having trouble justifying their own position,
now with a newfound importance, one they will not let go of easily but extend to whatever degree possible. It isn’t that some aren’t good or sincere, just that a lot aren’t all that much so.
Exactly what was going through my mind. The lines seem out of proportion to the situation. I know of a number of church food banks that operate, this during the low unemployment time, and people are pulling up in luxury vehicles for their free food.
Not buying it.
Why Sweden Isn’t Forcing Its Citizens to Stay Home Due to the Coronavirus Sweden’s top epidemiologist explains his country’s radical pandemic policies
The biggest difference between the great depression pictures and the current one?
$80 million worth of cars
Not saying that people aren’t hurting, but it’s a reminder that poverty means something different today than it did in the 1930s.
For example, my grandfather (age 12) couldn’t bring himself to eat the family pet rabbit when his mother felt compelled to cook it up.
Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, while maintaining some historical perspective until it does.
Maybe it says the US is designed around using cars nowadays ? People sell their car for a meal then afterwards they aren’t going to collect one if they can’t afford one etc. That some people previously spent excess on vehicles, well I guess most people do or did on something or other – not many had a large food stock even when they could have afforded it for example. Now those without savings cannot even afford their food. Not trying to say one thing or another, just points of view.
Poverty is timeless. If you compare the depression with ancient times, then people in the 1930s were wearing better quality clothes than people living during the Renaissance, but at the end of the day, if you can’t afford to buy food, you are poor.
I wonder though, because I know you can survive reasonably well off a hundred, at most two hundred, dollars a month of basic food. So maybe some people are completely tapped out now and the few possessions they have are not worth selling or possible to sell, or maybe it just seems more reasonable to queue for some food given they don’t know how long their savings will last. Either way it is not quite 30s style bread lines, because I think there that many had literally nothing of value left to buy food with. Sure it is not far off that for some though.
Well if you look at many of the photos, not only are many of the cars fairly new looking but a significant percentage of people are quite overweight.
So maybe they are used to eating a lot and have much debt on their vehicles that has its eye on their savings ? Not a crime I suppose…
And I’m reading of a glut in agricultural produce…
In some countries that are already with much poverty the circumstance is said to be more acute.
No savings, all in debt for cars. Do you think they will vote for someone on the side of savers or debtors?
Or they can’t get food from empty local stores.
Is that going on much ? I know there was an initial dash to stock up, but here in Europe food stores seem stocked again, restrictions make shopping more awkward but not as much as the queue in the photo…
US is a few weeks behind Europe.
Maybe many of them have nothing better to do with their time now and since they are allowed out to queue for food for free, why not?
(I hope that’s the case, but fear it is more dire.)
I don’t think many would wait in their car an hour or three for a bag of food unless they thought they had to…mind you, you see the queue at sales and so on so it’s anybody’s guess. Maybe for many it just makes sense or is “the thing to do” rather than trek around for stores or something. I don’t know.
Circumstances can rapidly deteriorate when conditions are bad enough. In the summer of 1941, the people of Leningrad took food for granted the same way we do today. The German army cut off the city in September. By October, the people of Leningrad were eating their pets, often swapping their pets with another family for one of similar weight so they wouldn’t have to kill and eat their own. By November, parents couldn’t let their kids outside to play unsupervised because of opportunistic cannibals and meat merchants. Well over a third of the city ultimately died, mostly from starvation.
Obviously, things won’t get anywhere near as bad for us as things got for the people of Leningrad during the siege, but things can still get pretty bad, especially if the government sends all of the money to corporations and does nothing for the poor, especially if the bailouts hyperinflate the dollar, making food even less affordable. I’m glad I’m on a farm and not living in the inner city.
Everything is working according to the design of the neoliberals. This is not a bug, it’s a feature.
It was a republican (lower caps for you Cock-Suckers) administration that implemented this Fiasco led by Orange Julius…
Socialism is defined as redistribution of wealth and the difference between Neolibs and Fuck-publicans is the Fuck-publicans redistribute it upwards with tax breaks to the rich elite and giveaways for the extremely Rich Corporatocracy.
The wealthy (aided by Fuck-publican politicians) want Capitalism when the economy is humming along and Socialism when it goes South…
“Greatest economy ever!!!”
You can take that to the bank …. the food bank that is.
I also agree that money should be going to states to feed people. But this is a banana republic. And we don’t even have that many bananas here, just plain banana derivatives.
I made a donation on GoFundMe the other day, and it made me think that GoFundMe and Amazon are probably the real government nowadays.
Ignorance got these people broke and hungry. Not the government.
Where are the checks? Treasury says that the IRS? can only process a limited number of check per week. Some people won’t get a check until 20 weeks. Is the check-processing department working 24/7? No. Is the check-processing department working on weekends? No.
The country is unable to respond to a crisis of any major sort. The people it hires for these incidents are, no fault of their own, completely out of their normal element when it come to preparedness. No Plan, No training. No implementation.
What would happen if we had a “real” emergency? The Chinese would own us.
The people that really need the checks are screwed because they are taking care of social security recipients first which is stupid because they are already getting an income and in most cases that’s all they get anyway.
The IRS has closed ALL of its physical offices and most employees are working remotely. But what I have read is that the IRS as a company is not setup to work remotely. Uh oh.
It’s mainly via direct deposit, I believe. The IRS site for making applications is supposedly going up any day. They announced the 17th earlier, so with any luck that will come through. Many difficulties applying for the small business relief apparently, but also billions have already been loaned, so I guess it depends which portal you go through. One reporter said the small town banks were much better than the majors. Only telephone companies provide worse retail experience than the big banks.
It’s all rubbish. If they wanted to they could just put $3,000 in every bank account in the country with a few keyboard strokes and that would be that.
The country really is a bit of a banana republic – but that’s been the case for several decades now. Maybe a good shakedown – painful and confusing as it is – will prove just what the doctor ordered.
Good news? Average death rates in China, US – even Italy I believe – are below the last 4 year average for these months. The virus is saving lives even as hysterical responses to it threaten to destroy life savings..
The Chinese do own you. The wealth transferred after Clinton signed the Most favored nation treaty.
A lot of us..not all..have had it so good for so long. Complacency has set in.