RobWDW1971
Well-Known Member
One thing you are missing from the calculation is that dead is dead. You don’t come back. An economic downturn can be very bad, but the economy will recover. Let’s say for argument sake it takes 5 years for the economy to fully recover, in 5 years time we as a country will be financially back to where we were pre-virus. If we chose to favor the economy now and just let more people die in 5 years those people are still dead. Would some of them have died anyway in those 5 years, yes but not everyone who would die would be old and sick. We also have no idea what the impact to the economy will really be. The stock market will recover. There’s a lot of money sitting on the sidelines right now just waiting for a sign that the bottom has hit. Small businesses and some individuals may fair worse, but like 2001 and 2008 jobs will come back and unemployment will drop eventually.
Fully understand that position - but it doesn't address the point of the conversation. By definition, and I assume you would agree with this, every strategy does not have an equal outcome. And I'm sure you would agree that every strategy will affect the economy both short-term and long-term very differently. And I'm sure you would agree that different strategies will actually save different amounts of people.
Then the discussion still remains is THIS strategy providing the best return on that impact? Your post simply implies that we're doing something, it will help (undefined), and the economy will recover (speculative and timeline impossible to know). That is not a strategy.
And to be really callous since you mentioned the dead, you are also not considering that many of the elderly we are "saving" will be dead very soon anyway. When we are talking about 80 and 90 year olds with pre-existing conditions being among the dead, you have to factor in the actual years and what condition of life you have "saved".
Using an extreme example to make the point, if someone came to you two months ago when you had never heard of COVID-19, and said "Hey, we have a new federal program where the goal is to temporarily extend the lives of 70+ year olds suffering from pre-existing conditions and it will cost approximately $100 billion of taxpayer money" I doubt you would have signed up for that and thought they were insane. But that is exactly to some extent what we are doing.
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