The immediate impacts of the Coronavirus worldwide and in the United States is horrific but the economic fallout after this pandemic ends may be more deadly.
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But the economic fallout and resulting impact on our fragile just-in-time supply-chain infrastructure from Covid-19 and the resulting austerity and deaths may easily surpass what was attributed to the 1930's economic collapse in the U.S. during the Great Depression, and may last for a decade or more.
Few people realize that the United States imports a major percentage of what Americans need to maintain the lifestyles to which they have grown accustomed and depend. And many of those imports have already slowed, significantly. It's like pushing a huge boulder uphill; the moment you lose momentum, it can roll-back and right over the top of you.
Excerpt from Foreign Policy Magazine:
"Beyond the immediate treatment of those infected with coronavirus, however, Western governments have almost universally shut down rather than ramped up production. As one financial analyst pointed out, “lockdown economics” is in many ways the exact opposite of the wartime economics of total mobilization.
During both world wars, economic mobilization enrolled unprecedentedly large groups of male and female workers in mass production. The coronavirus’s disruption of supply chains and the social distancing measures of today, however, are currently putting millions of employees in the manufacturing and service sectors out of work."
Sorting Out The Pandemic May Not End The Crises
Folks that loiter too long in cities in the hopes that sorting out the pandemic will end the crises may be in for a very rude, and potentially deadly surprise (time is already a critical aspect for effective tactics).
Millions of people may end up stuck in cities and or surrounding urban areas (subjected to levels of austerity they cannot even imagine) and will lose the option to relocate to rural areas where long-term survival is far more comfortable and sustainable, as history has shown.
We know from historic (empirical experience) evidence that folks in rural America fared far better during the Great Depression than folks in and around cities and urban areas. And that was when we had to feed and supply only about one-third of population that exists today, about 123-million in 1930, compared to 327-million today!
Few city people have any meaningful understanding of just how much food and other supplies and services, and logistics are needed per-person to survive for one year, let alone for several years.
The Survival Successes Of Americans
And this is just the beginning; skills that are now lost to most of the millennia generation are what augmented the survival successes of Americans during the Great Depression. Compared to the 1930's, few Americans today know how to repair plumbing, electrical circuits, gasoline and electric motors, weld, grow gardens, make clothing, hunt and butcher game animals, and repair or make a host of other needed items at home. Worse yet, very few have the tools and training to effect such endeavors.
On the working ranch where I spent my formative years in the mountains of Southern Oregon, with 5-kids and two adults, we needed a full acre of intensive planting to grow the needed vegetables for each year. The garden augmented the food provided by the nearly 100 live chickens (fryers) and 20 laying hens.
We also had a dozen pigs as well as a small herd of Hereford cattle and sheep.
Finally, we had a good fresh-water well, a spring-fed pond with trout and a milk cow. Even if someone handed all these assets off to most people from a city today, odds are most people wouldn't have a clue about keeping it all going; and these hard-earned, experienced-based skills needed aren't something you can 'Google'. Living off the land, or 'off-grid living' as it is said today, is nearly a lost art, along with black-smithing and woodsman skills.
Economic Fallout Could Cause Supply Chain To Break Down
As this informed article states, and based upon the detailed research of many other accredited experts, the supply chain will break down as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic to some minimal level, leaving most of the U.S. Population out of work and in dire straights, even as our just-in-time supply chain capacities shrink (not even considering the millions of homeless people in America; 150,000 in California alone.)
For those people who are lucky enough to have a rural survival option, my advice is; don't delay!
The current Las Vegas odds are; it's only going to get much, much worse from here. Some credible experts are now expecting that about one-third of all Americans will be out of work by this summer, leaving up to 100-million Americans heading into the winter of 2021 with no job prospects, no income and little food.
"The Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis president, James Bullard, has said he expects unemployment to hit 30% in the second quarter..."
This is no time for people to be putting their heads in the sand. It's a time for hard decisions and decisive action.
Creator: Wild Horse Fire Brigade (www.WHFB.us)
Author @ HorseTalk
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