We are facing an unemployment crisis that will be far worse than the Great Depression. This is just the reality that we are facing.
The economic fallout from the unprecedented social distancing requirements has been devastating.
Business shutdowns have led to a record 26.5 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits since mid-March. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted on Friday that the economy would contract at an annual rate of nearly a 40% in the second quarter.
Even next year, the CBO forecast calls for an unemployment rate averaging above 10%. Before the pandemic struck, the U.S. jobless rate was hovering at a 50-year low of 3.5%.
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett told reporters on Sunday the jobless rate would likely hit 16% or more in April.
“I think the next couple of months are going to look terrible,” Hassett said. “You’re going to see numbers as bad as anything we’ve ever seen before.”
If a White House economic adviser is admitting that unemployment is at least 16 percent, you know things are bad.
I personally believe that the true unemployment rate will rise to somewhere between 30 percent and 50 percent. And I think that this is a very conservative estimate.
What will probably happen is that they will manipulate the unemployment numbers in such a way to make people think things aren’t as bad as they are. So whatever the official unemployment numbers are, just assume that the actual numbers are much worse than the reported numbers.
We are literally sleepwalking into the biggest economic disaster the world has ever seen. Meanwhile, media pundits and politicians are claiming that we are all in danger of dying from a virus that has proven to be no more deadly than the flu.
The criminal irresponsibility of what has been done here is difficult to comprehend.
God help us all.
